Saturday, May 23, 2009

Chopra Wants To 'Productize' Innovations

President Obama's Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra views the administration's open government initiative, which formally kicked off Thursday, as one leg of a three-legged transparency and accountability stool. In his first interview after being confirmed by the Senate, he told Tech Daily Dose that the interactive public consultation on principles to frame the initiative will culminate later this summer in OMB guidance to agencies. "We're certainly not standing still waiting for the recommendations," he said, pointing out that on his first day in office, Obama called on cabinet agencies to get involved immediately. The White House has already provided what Chopra called a menu of open government criteria that departments have begun to put into practice. Early results of their work can be found in an "innovation gallery" at WhiteHouse.gov/Open. "As you can see, our employees aren't waiting on memos on what policy directive there should be. They're embracing principles that the president has outlined and working within their leadership structures to make them effective," he said. "Our challenge as leaders is to help support and nurture their enthusiasm."

Another component, which Chopra believes is potentially the most important, is the mandate that he work with Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra, the General Services Administration and others to distill the components of a successful open government initiative and provision them in a manner that can be reused by anybody in government through the GSA or other means. One example is Obama's online town hallin March, which attracted more than 100,000 participants who submitted and voted on topics he would address in a live Internet event. "We need to figure out what components allowed him to be successful in that experiment and carry them across government," he said. Then Chopra introduced his new favorite buzzword: "productize." "We have to productize the components that have been deemed successful in our 120 days and take it from there."