Leadership Insight > Vivek Kundra

District of Columbia CTO Talks About the Payoff of Smart Technology Investments

By Elizabeth M. Ferrarini

Adrian Fenty, the Mayor of the District of Columbia, has been on a mission to invest heavily in redesigning the way his municipal administration works by making it more responsive to constituents' needs. Information technology provides the critical underpinning for many e-government initiatives, such as a Web portal that allows residents to get immediate access to a variety of services. The Mayor also has been looking at technology as a way to make government smaller, by eliminating unnecessary costs, such as the use of commercial software, and increasing efficiency by streamlining processes, such as the movement of paper.

In May 2007, Mayor Fenty appointed Vivek Kundra to serve as the Chief Technology Officer for the District of Columbia. Kundra oversees an IT staff of 700 people, a $75 million annual IT operating budget, and a $121 million budget for capital IT projects. Working with Fenty, Kundra has the challenge of deciding what technology investments to make, and then how to leverage those investments to fully enable the city, its employees, and its citizens.

Fenty could not have picked a better person for the job. Kundra's background includes a cabinet-level position for the Commonwealth of Virginia, an IT leadership role for Arlington, Virginia, and CEO of a security company. He also worked on business and economic development issues for the World Cities Alliance.

The BTM Institute recently sat down with Kundra to discuss what capital technology investments he is making, and what process he is using to evaluate these investments. Here's what he had to say:

The most prominent challenges I inherited included how to establish an effective governance process and how to monitor investments, both of which were lacking.

Procurement still presents a challenge, which I’m vigilantly working on with our chief procurement officer. We’ve deployed a web-based application and are now carrying out the strategic sourcing model. Moving to the electronic world helps because it will hold everyone accountable.

Q. Why did you decide to go with Web-based applications for everything from the desktop to public safety?

If you look at capital-intensive projects over time, they tend to take too many years to accomplish, don't provide the business value that IT promises, and aren’t agile enough. You can get immediate value from innovations such as cloud computing and software as a service. You can give software developers feedback instantly. Moreover, the government doesn't have to own massive infrastructure. That's a very important reason. That's one of the reasons I made the decision.

Moore’s Law also helped me to decide to go in this direction. In the 1960s, a microprocessor had 10,000 transistors on it. Today, a microprocessor can have 10 billion of them. Technology evolves so rapidly. The next generation workforce uses Web applications, such as Facebook, YouTube or google, to communicate and to get work done. These applications will enable our people to get work done any time, anywhere, and on their own terms. Making investments in Web-based applications will ensure our leadership position.

Q. What are some of the capital investments you've made to help public safety personnel be more responsive to citizens?

We’re looking at the Iphone, not just for the police, but also for public education, and other administrative tasks, such as issuing permits. We want to put more technology in the field rather than architecting a $100 million enterprise system, which will become a major problem in 10 years. Historically, major projects of that magnitude have had a tendency to fail across government enterprises. To this end, we’re trying to transform business operations by making those investments in the field.

Our simple steps include deploying more than 800 Panasonic Toughbook laptops in police cruisers by October 2008. We already have a little over 250 plus in the cruisers now. Police officers will now write incident reports electronically. This process will eliminate scanning a paper copy, and then routing the document through another system to get it to its destination.

We’re also investing heavily in public safety applications, such as tracking overtime, and deployment of police and firefighters throughout the enterprise. We’re looking at cluster-based solutions.

We’ve asked ourselves this question: If you can get high-speed connectivity at your local coffee shop, why shouldn’t the government allow its employees, as well as residents, to have access to technology that enables them to communicate better and faster.

Q. What are you doing to make government less paper-intensive and speed up the decision-making process?

We have a war on paper initiatives. The business of government includes moving a lot of paper around. The digital scan center we’re building will enable all of our paper-based communications to be routed to employees electronically through PBXs. This process will eliminate moving paper from one government building to another.

We’re also building a cluster-based business intelligence platform. It will provide us with the first state longitudinal educational data warehouse, focusing on student performance information. It will also help us to build a human services data warehouse, which will help make more intelligent decisions in this area.

We’ve launched the ‘One Card,’ which allows DC residents to interact and connect easily to government services rather than to multiple bureaucracies. They can use the card to check out a book or sign up for swimming lessons at the local recreation center. This card eliminates the need for dozens of agencies to issue their own card to residents.

Using the idea of the One Card, we’d like to create a business one-stop for people who are bringing new ventures to the D.C. area. They could do everything electronically, such as getting a license, without visiting multiple offices.

Q. At the end of the day, what value are all of these capital investments going to buy the District of Columbia?

Our primary decision to make these investments goes beyond efficiency and money, although both are also important. The ultimate value comes down to a government that knows how to respond to its constituents’ needs. That’s what is most important to us. For example, ensuring that a police officer or firefighter gets to the right address quickly.

We also made these investments to ensure that we operate as efficiently as we can. Technology makes this possible. It also enables us to introduce innovations that will help us work differently today, and in the future.

As good stewards of taxpayers’ dollars, we have a duty to spend every dollar intelligently. We want to make the right investments. We don’t operate in a vacuum. For example, in the 1980’s the spreadsheet, a simple innovation, changed the way most of us use information to make decisions. Likewise, today’s business intelligence platforms allow organizations to make smarter decisions.

Q. How have you automated the process of making and monitoring IT investments?

I changed this process right after I came on board. We created an investment tool that isn’t happening anywhere else, especially in government. It applies the principles of the stock market. When you go to get a stock quote, you can also see the P/E ratio, the news stories related to that company, and its performance for the past year or the past three years. You get analysts’ comments about the company’s strengths and weaknesses.

Likewise, I can access a real-time happenings index and figure out if projects are on time and on budget. I can also see all of the content associated with those projects. Based on this information I can make decisions whether to kill those projects, to invest more in those projects, or to hold those projects from moving forward until further review is completed. The system allows me to make buy, sell, or hold decisions on IT projects. It has been extremely useful and aware of the way this administration governs.

Q. What's your governance process for tracking investments with your model and how has it improved communications and decision-making with stakeholders?

We first created a portfolio management team, broken down by clusters of healthcare, public safety, education, economic development, and government operations. Each team leader acts like a mutual fund manager. They grade every IT project.

Historically, IT people haven’t done a good job of communicating technology clearly. They tend to think of themselves as being omnipotent bearers of the greatest technology that can solve everything. The cluster-based investment board concept has helped to improve our decision making process. At these meetings, we can count on the police chief or the fire chief to say: ‘My objective is to bring down the crime rate. What type of technology can we deploy to help that goal become a reality?’ We can review their IT investments to see what makes sense, what doesn't make sense, where we need to spend more of the capital, and where we need to shift it based on how they are performing.

I really pushed for an innovation like this. People tend to treat IT investments as magical initiatives. If a project is five years behind and $10 million over budget, you must question what the management team has been doing. Using my model, I’ve killed projects, suspended the management team, and brought on new people. It has enabled us to monitor the entire government and my job. I have to worry about everything from recreation departments to DC public schools. We needed a disciplinary approach to investments that was also fair, as well as analytical, providing both the quantitative and the qualitative side of each story.

Q. Have you done anything else to look at the operational side of the projects behind these IT investments?

We have a team working on TechStat, our initiative to research the best practices across the world and benchmark against those practices within DC government.

Q. What are the challenges of working with the Mayor when it comes to investment decisions?

He gets technology. In fact, he carries multiple Blackberries so he can connect in real time to his constituents. I hold a cabinet level position where I work to advance the Mayor’s agenda. He focuses on services, and forces his cabinet to ask themselves each day these questions: ‘What are you doing for the average residents? How are you making their lives better?’ I find it refreshing to work with someone with this viewpoint.

Q. Since you are a forward-thinking person who likes to get things done, how are you coping with the government bureaucracy?

It's my biggest challenge. I’m driving a pace of innovation that requires people to be open to change. The government, in general, tends to resist change. Innovation can’t just happen at the top. We need to find a smart way to channel it across the organization. <> I’m diligently working on the speed at which our government moves.

Elizabeth M. Ferrarini is a writer from Boston, Massachusetts. Reach her at elizabethferrarini@yahoo.com.