Government opens its wallet to IT

Don’t let bear market rallies distract you — this is going to be a horrific year or two for the economy and for tech. Except, maybe, if you work for (or sell to) the federal government. As business spending on tech drops, the stimulus package and the new plus-size federal budget will make up for some of that decline.

So where is that money going? We’ve seen the numbers: $19 billion to drive adoption of electronic health records; $7.2 billion in broadband grants and loans; and $355 million for improved cybersecurity. Plus, some undisclosed portion of the $25 billion budget increase for the Department of Veterans Affairs will go toward updating health IT systems.

[ For further perspective on the nation’s tech policy in the years ahead, see “A high-tech agenda for President Obama.” ]

To get a better sense of how that money will be used, I attended this year’s FOSE (Federal Office Systems Exposition), an enormous enterprise IT trade show in D.C. One of the most interesting discussions I had was with Vish Sankaran, program director for Federal Health Architecture initiative. His charge is to oversee the development of a gateway that participants in a National Health Information Network, slated to launch by 2014, will use to integrate electronic health records. But Sankaran recognizes that the technical challenges in creating the gateway are minor compared to getting a vast and diverse group of public and private health entities on the same page.

As InfoWorld’s Ephraim Schwartz notes in “Can IT meet the health records challenge?” that’s why $17 billion of the $19 billion goes to incentive payments for health organizations that opt for electronic health records and the new standards, processes, and formats associated with them. This recognizes that many health organizations — particularly smaller ones — won’t endure the disruption of implementing new technology and changing business processes without a reward for doing so. Actually, this makes sense: Organizational inertia is always the biggest obstacle in any huge public or private initiative.

That will surely be the broadest problem faced by Vivek Kundra, whom President Obama named as federal CIO last week. Armed with a $71 billion budget, Kundra will oversee the fed’s enterprise architecture, foster interoperability among government agencies, and ensure information security and privacy. But naturally, he can also use friendly advice from us, which is why InfoWorld’s Paul Venezia wrote “10 IT agenda items for the first U.S. CIO.”

All I can say is that InfoWorld knows how to pick ’em: The 37-year-old Kundra was an InfoWorld CTO 25 winner last year. The former CTO for the city of Washington, D.C., Kundra believes in exploiting off-the-shelf consumer technology such as Facebook and the iPhone, as well as leveraging open source software, rather than clinging to the ground-up, proprietary solutions government tends to favor.

Part of Kundra’s mandate is to use Web 2.0 technologies to increase citizen participation in government and to present government data on the Web in digestible form. Examples of both can be found on the Digital Public Square area of the D.C. government Web site.

These ideas — particularly electronic health information exchange — are not new. But big funding increases and fresh thinking may go a long way toward changing the historically dysfunctional relationship between technology and government. In this instance, at least, no one is rooting for failure.