The federal government is many things, but transparent it is not. As the nation’s first chief information officer, Vivek Kundra is attempting to pull the federal infrastructure into the information age by making government data freely available online. Is it possible for technology to revolutionize the way we interact with government?
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN: We all know that the White House has a Facebook page. Beyond that, what ways can the government use technology to better serve taxpayers? KUNDRA: The power of information technology is in far more than just setting up a Web site or serving up content on Facebook or Twitter. I look at Government 2.0 as a fundamental reengineering of how the American people interact with their government.
Just consider the huge experience gap that Americans have when they go online to make a hotel reservation or buy a book through Amazon versus how they interact with the public sector. In the public sector—whether it’s paying taxes, applying for student aid or applying for Social Security benefits—that experience involves turning in paper forms, waiting in line or waiting on hold on the phone.
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Part of what we’re trying to do is fundamentally reengineer the back-end systems, the processes, to make sure that the experience the American people have with the government looks much more like the experience they have when they interact with a private-sector company.
If we accept that much of the trouble with government can be framed as a customer service issue, how can technology help fix this?
Unfortunately, a lot of people dismiss online reservations or book purchases as a kind of lightweight customer service application. What they don’t realize is the complexity that’s abstracted on these back-end systems. The government has not kept pace with this innovation. There just isn’t the Darwinian pressure that you see in the private sector. Part of what we’re focused on is making sure that we close the technology gap.
And you can do this by placing government databases online?
It’s part of the larger trend of what’s happening online. Look at YouTube and look at Apple. Now, YouTube didn’t go out there and create all these videos. YouTube essentially built the platform, and a third party created all that content. Same thing with Apple—Apple didn’t go out there and create the most innovative applications you find on the iPhone. A third party created those applications.
In the same way, what we’re trying to do is figure out how to move toward government as a platform. In this way, we can tap into the ingenuity of the American people and empower the American people to solve some of the most difficult problems and challenges we face as a country. There’s a recognition that the federal government does not have a monopoly on the best ideas and that the best ideas don’t necessarily live within the four walls of Washington.
How much progress have you made?
When Data.gov was launched, we launched it with 47 data sets about a year ago. Today it has more than 272,000 data sets.
But more important, we’ve been encouraging communities of innovators, developers and watchdogs to actually use those data in three ways: one, to hold government accountable; two, to create innovative applications; and three, to find breakthroughs at the intersection of multiple data sets.
What do you mean by that, “breakthroughs at the intersection of multiple data sets?”
Well, just like in life, true value lies at the intersection of multiple disciplines. If we look at music and mathematics, that’s where true value lies. It’s the same for data.
Just to give you a very basic example, when [in 2000] the Department of Defense made the decision to stop scrambling the data from the Global Positioning System, it essentially gave birth to the GPS industry. At the time people could not have imagined that all of a sudden we would have the ability to go to our local car rental store and for about 10 bucks rent a GPS device in a new city we were navigating.
But more interestingly, we can now combine that real-time GPS data with crime data or health care data. All of a sudden, what we end up with as citizens is better services, better insight into how society functions, and a government that is able to more intelligently serve the American people.
Yet “open” is not the default setting in government. To take just one example, in 2001 then attorney general John Ashcroft sent a memo to the heads of federal agencies encouraging them to block as many Freedom of Information Act requests as possible. How do you reverse this reflex and institutionalize the open-government effort?
On his first full day in office, President Obama issued a memorandum on transparency and open government. And part of that memorandum challenged us to hardwire the philosophical principles around transparency, participation and open government into everything we do. We’re changing the default setting of the public sector from one that is closed, secretive and opaque to one that is open, transparent and participatory. And every agency was charged with releasing high-value, information-rich data sets as part of the open-government directive.
What practical benefits have come from opening up those data?
Well, let me give you two very specific examples of what happens when you shine light on the operations of government. The first is cost savings. In the private sector, one third of information technology projects ends up getting terminated if they don’t perform. In the public sector, we never kill anything.
Now we have launched the Information Technology Dashboard, which publishes data about every major IT investment in the U.S. government. As soon as we went live, the Department of Veterans Affairs essentially halted 45 IT projects, terminating 12. Those 12 terminated projects saved about $54 million. Then a couple of weeks ago at the Office of Management and Budget, we halted over 30 major financial systems that were not performing well. That’s about $3 billion in annual spending on the systems that were way behind schedule and way over budget. And just last week we terminated a Veterans Department financial system that was about $400 million over budget and years behind schedule. Instead of putting good money after bad money, we decided to terminate that project. That’s one example, accountability as a result of shining a light on the operations of government.
The second example is applications. We released aviation data from the Department of Transportation, and all of a sudden we saw a competition set up by the Sunlight Foundation [a nonprofit organization that advocates transparency in government] to develop applications. And as a function of that, some developers created an app called FlyOnTime.us that allows you to see average landing times and takeoff times for every flight in the country as well as real-time data on wait times at airports.
Professor James A. Hendler of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has set up a team of about eight students who are developing some of the most creative applications that use the Semantic Web to slice and dice information across the public sector. They have made it possible to see who was visiting the White House and when, where we’re distributing foreign aid funding, and how we’re performing in terms of environment and health care.
These are some really, really innovative applications. And these applications are being created in ways that would have cost us millions of dollars, and we would have ended up with a poor product. There are more than 24,000 Web sites in the U.S. government. Yet when you look at some of the most innovative applications, you can see how we can slice and dice the available data to provide a much better customer-facing experience than we have so far.
In the U.S. today, we have a number of enormous challenges—energy security, global warming, health care and long-term deficit problems, for starters. Is opening up the federal IT going to be able to have a real impact on the big things, or are we just nibbling around the edges here?
Well, I think it’s going to have a huge impact on major policy issues, too. If we go back in history, one of the things we have to recognize is technology is fundamentally changing the equation. It used to be that, in the olden days, people would gather around a public square, the Agora, to petition their government, to conduct commerce, and it was a physical public square. Today we can actually create a digital public square and have a front-row seat to how our government works in ways we never could have done before. With this vast array of data on every aspect of government operations—whether it’s health care, whether it’s the environment, whether it’s education—we can shift our debate to have us much more focused on facts and science than conjecture. And it also provides for the first time the ability for the American people to lift the veil on how their government actually functions.
Think about the health care system. If you go online today, you have the ability to compare consumer products to one another. You can compare cars in terms of gas mileage and 0 to 60 speed, or you can compare cameras based on aperture and price. Yet when we think about health care, it’s been very difficult, historically, to compare one hospital to another, one doctor to another.
There used to be a Web site called Hospital Compare that the Department of Health and Human Services ran for years. Yet it wasn’t very well utilized. The American people didn’t really have access to it. But by democratizing those data something really interesting happened.
The Bing search engine took this Hospital Compare data, and now if you’re in front of a computer and you type the name of a hospital on Bing.com, what you’ll see is the average rating by patients of that hospital and typical outcomes in that hospital. It’s information that’s at your fingertips that before you would have had to navigate a vast bureaucracy to get access to those data.
You mentioned earlier that it’s very difficult for the average citizen to interact with an agency like the IRS. Why can’t we just go online, and fill out a form, and take 20 minutes to do our taxes every year? Why do we have to pay accountants billions of dollars to do it for us?
That’s part of what the IRS is actually undergoing right now—a modernization of its back-end systems to really focus on the customer. Historically, what we’ve seen in the federal government, unfortunately, is that people have focused very much internally on how the bureaucracy operates, rather than how their customers operate.
And part of what we’re trying to achieve here is to make sure that there’s enough pressure to basically close the gap between the consumer experience in our private life and our experience with the public sector.
A very specific example is what we’ve been able to do in a partnership between the Department of Education and the IRS. It used to be that you would have to fill out a very exhaustive questionnaire when you’re filling out an application for student aid. And the agencies would not share data.
But what we’ve been able to do is bring the IRS and the Department of Education to the table together to partner, to streamline the application process for student aid. Now as a result of that effort, we’ve been able to eliminate dozens of questions on the student aid form and fundamentally reengineer that experience so that those forms are prepopulated with data that the government already has.
On the other hand, I’m not sure I want the IRS to be sharing how much money I make with other government agencies. How do we build in systems to protect our privacy?
That’s part of the challenge. Even when we’re talking about Data.gov and democratizing data, one of the things we have to be very mindful of is the mosaic of facts. Individual data sets may not reveal anything, but when they’re combined, it opens up the ability to get access to information that may be sensitive in nature. That’s why before data sets are put on Data.gov, agencies are scrubbing those data sets to make sure that they can’t be sliced and diced in a way that would compromise privacy or national security in any way.
But in terms of government sharing information, you’re absolutely right, and that’s why it’s just a very deliberative effort to make sure that, first and foremost, we’re protecting the privacy of the American people and that as information is shared, it’s done so on an as-needed basis.
