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The 463 blog points us to an interview with Mitch Kapor of Lotus and EFF fame, in which he makes the case for a national Chief Technology Officer. The idea seems to be that technology policy in the United States is currently fragmented among a bunch of different positions, and having a designated top technologist in the government would help to bring coherence to the nation’s technology policy. It sounds like a reasonable idea at first blush, but on closer examination it might create more problems than it solves.
To start with, it’s important to distinguish between two jobs that are really quite different. One job is to coordinate the government’s own IT infrastructure. Currently, IT decisions are made by the various federal agencies and departments within the federal government. A national CTO could conceivably set guidelines or policies related to IT infrastructure that would apply across the executive branch. The [...]