Aneesh Chopra

We waited and now it’s official: The Senate on Thursday confirmed Aneesh Chopra as the nation’s chief technology officer.

Chopra, as you may recall, was nominated by President Obama for the position back in April. At the time Chopra was serving as Secretary of Technology for the Commonwealth of Virginia.

So, what’s next for Chopra as the nation’s first-ever CTO? Chopra has his eye on using technology to further progress on a variety of fronts: energy, healthcare, homeland security, education and job growth. He provided specifics at a Tuesday confirmation hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee.

“I have seen the benefits of this approach in my most recent capacity serving as Virginia’s Secretary of Technology under Governor Tim Kaine,” Chopra said. “We championed broadband and telework policies that brought good jobs to our more rural communities hard hit by an increasingly competitive global market. We invested in our universities to commercialize high value R&D and sought new collaborations across state boundaries to deliver a more productive regional approach.”

For a look at what area executives and CTOs are saying about Chopra as CTO, click here and here. And for our exclusive spotlight with Chopra, be sure to check out this 2007 interview.

A very hot topic among all technologists, from DC to Silicon Valley, is how the Obama election will change the technology landscape.   There are five key megatrends in IT today, and we should analyze change in the context of each.  These five megatrends in IT are:

• Convergence and trend towards unified communications and user empowerment
• Globalization and increasing internationalization of IT and demographic shifts
• Increasing open development of software and hardware
• Power, Cooling and Space (PCS) impacting data centers and every place computing is done
• Increasing pace of technology development and probability of disruption

President-Elect Obama has long articulated a technology strategy on his website.  It is most definitely worth a read by all enterprise technologists since it will form the basis of many of his policies and actions (one of the key leaders coordinating this plan was Potomac Officer’s Club speaker Julius Genachowski). Read the rest of this entry »

ExecutiveBiz members have been treated to some great presentations from Web2.0 experts, including some who have succeeded in implementing Web2.0 capabilities in very large organizations.  Two of the greatest presenters who have interacted with us are Chris Rasmussen and Sean Dennehy, pictured here.

After engaging with them in our venue and tracking how Web2.0 technologies are implemented in many other organizations I have a thesis I would like to try out on you.  I believe there are three ways to reap the benefit of Web2.0 in large enterprises:

1) Just wait and do nothing.  Eventually all people in large organizations leave, either on their feet or on their back, and as they do they will be replaced by people who probably know more about Web2.0 so these new capabilities will slowly be more widely used.

2) Encourage self learning and an individual examination of Web2.0 capabilities and use grass-roots efforts to change big organizations, or

3) Establish formal training programs, strong evangelism and executive leadership towards a vision of Web2.0.

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In his classic work describing the state of the Chief Technology Officer discipline ”The Role of the CTO”, Tom Berray of Cabot Consultants articulates four models of CTOs:

• The Infrastructure Manager
• The Big Thinker
• The Technology Visionary and Operations Manager
• The External-facing Technologist

These well defined models were based on discussions with hundreds of technologists as well as written surveys. It remains the definitive work on CTO roles, and has been referenced by some of the greats, including the personal blog of Amazon CTO Werner Vogels. Werner writes there: “I believe Tom Berray’s quadrant gives the best framework for reasoning about what makes CTOs successful.” I have to agree.

As a CTO, I immediately appreciated Tom’s groundbreaking work in describing the community, since it helped me talk with people about my own role. Too frequently people misunderstand what a CTO does, in part because CTOs perform different roles in different enterprises. Ambiguity can impede effectiveness so the clarity of this model has been very helpful.

Ambiguity over the role can also contribute to challenges for organization seeking a new CTO, which leads to another important aspect of Tom’s work. He provides a mapping of CTO roles to organizational needs in a way that can help companies determine the best type of CTO for their needs.

If you are preparing a search for a CTO, a study of Tom’s framework can help provide context which can ensure you are looking for the right set of skills. If you already have an executive on your team responsible for technology strategy, you may want to ask them if they are familiar with this study, since it may help them in their dialog with others over their role.

Bob Gourley is the co-founder and CTO of Crucial Point LLC and is the former CTO of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Bob blogs on enterprise IT at CTOvision.com

Long before he ever became CTO of Nortel Government Solutions, Alan Harbitter started his own company, PEC Solutions, with two other partners. When it went public in 2000, Harbitter wound up running a publicly traded company for the next five years. Then, in 2005, another milestone occurred: The company reached 1,700 employees and a $250M year run rate. That’s when it merged with Nortel Federal to form Nortel Government Solutions. The rest, as they say, is history. Today, as CTO, Harbitter has gone back to the things he loves most: more direct work in the areas he started out in — computer science and information technology.

Briefly tell us your background and how you got to where you are today.

Alan Harbitter: From an academic perspective, my training is in computer science and I received my PhD from George Mason. I’ve been interested in the university presence in this community for a while, so I’ve taught on and off at Mason. From a career perspective, I started out at Computer Sciences Corporation where I met my [former] partners, Dave Karlgaard and Paul Rice. Dave, Paul, and I started a company, PEC Solutions, in 1985. We went public in 2000. So I wound up running a publicly traded company for five years with Dave and Paul. In 2005 we reached 1,700 employees and a $250M year run rate. At that point, we merged with Nortel Federal to form Nortel Government Solutions. Back in the PEC days my time was monopolized with the responsibilities of running a publicly traded company. And I really missed more direct work in areas I started out in — computer science and information technology. So, with the Nortel acquisition in 2005, I got to return to what I loved the most. All of my duties now are CTO duties, and fewer dealings with accountants, lawyers, and stock analysts.

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