CTO: Time for govt innovation has arrived

U.S. chief technology office Aneesh Chopra says he's working hard to enable the federal government to embrace innovation, user-friendliness and best practices, but doing so means modernizing purchasing rules and procedures.

Speaking at the Churchill Club in San Francisco, Chopra said:

If it's this easy to consume [technology] in our personal lives, it should be just as easy to consume them in our professional lives.

That means modernizing the rules, he said, according to an eWeek report.

We want to encourage innovation to the extent we can, but we also realize it's not the easiest thing in the world to bring those innovations to the federal government. How many of you had tried to respond to an RFP [request for proposal] with 5,000 detailed requirements? When you do, your intervention could be done with pennies on the dollar. This is the challenge we're confronting in the 'right now.'

He pointed to two major areas where IT can be transformative: immigration and health care.

We worked closely together and came up with a vastly improved Website that will, for the first time ever, allow applicants to get their updates basically like Burger King's 'Have it your way': You can get it by text message [or] e-mail and can get it by visiting us online. We've opened up the kimono to say, 'This is how many steps there are to get a green card or whatever it is you're getting.' People can see where they are in the queue.

And in health care, health insurance reform and security best practices will allow IT innovation to flow to better support "front-end wellness activity," he said.