You're right, of course. What I DO like about this is the fact that Obama (seems to) know enough to say that he needs someone to help his administration understand technology. I can't fault that at all.
For what it's worth, there's already a bunch of guys who are supposed to be doing that. I believe there is a national CIO and a national organization of federal CIOs. I guess it couldn't hurt to have one more, though.
I disagree. if you haven't heard of him, and he exists, it's probably because he's doing a good job and hasn't broken anything big enough to make the nightly news.
I work with big organizations doing big software development (one of the reasons I hang out here is that not only am I a startup junkie, there's something really weird that happens when you scale software development past 6 or 7 guys)
As part of that, I try to keep part of my head in government software development, which is like a world unto itself. I have worked with a couple of agency CIOs, so I've heard of the larger CIO structure that they are part of. There is a lot of CIO-type stuff that was started, ironically, by the Bush administration when they came in. Stuff like balanced scorecards and a national Enterprise Architecture group. As you can imagine, there's a huge push for security, but there are also some really wild System-of-Systems stuff going on. Drop me an email and I can hook you up with more resources if you are interested.
