Dvorak Uncensored - Special Report: Is US Chief Information Officer (CIO) Vivek Kundra a Phony?

Is the US CIO scamming us? Check it out over at Dvorak Uncensored.  From the sounds of it, with the right contacts I could have had the US CIO job! At least I have 15 years of actual IT experience. Yes I was an art major in College, but IT is one of those industries where a computer degree of some kind doesn't really mean much. I vividly remember helping all the so called "computer majors" at my college who had to ask me, a computer tech in the lab, how to format disks and save their files. 

Knowing how to program something and knowing how to manage IT are two completely different things. Frankly, most colleges and universities aren't going to train anyone in useful and relevant technologies. At best they will hopefully train people how to think logically and learn new things quickly. Thinking logically and learning quickly aren't usually something that can be taught. Those are things that you can either do or not. So I can't fault Mr. Kundra for degrees other than computer degrees. On the other hand, it seems that he does have a MIS degree. I feel like I'm flip-flopping here, but just because someone has an MIS degree doesn't mean they can do IT management either. I know plenty of people with MIS degrees that couldn't tie their own shoes much like figure out how to create a desktop software management system or create a server farm that works. We called them "paper experts". The amount of certificates pasted all over someone's cube is usually inversely porportional to their actual ability to do something useful.

The whole thing seems cloudy, which is a problem. The US CIO's credentials and former experience should not be "cloudy". To make it worse, as Dvorak reports, he sounds like a 19 year old talking about Facebook and Google Docs. He does not seem like a very evolved or experienced IT guy to me based on the current reporting. I don't want to swallow the reporting wholesale, but there is certainly something foul in the... er... District of Columbia.

Bottom line... Show us the real qualifications of this guy and what his current plans are. I frankly won't care if he didn't seem qualified previously if he's doing a bang up job now... but the $18 million dollar Recovery.gov web site project doesn't bode well for his current plans. That makes him seem like a Pentagon guy who pays $1000 for a toilet seat, or just a phony. Time will tell. I'll try and keep my mind open.