Vivek Kundra - Career

Career

Kundra served as director of Infrastructure Technology for Arlington County, Virginia starting September 11, 2001.

Governor Tim Kaine appointed Kundra in January 2006 to the post of Assistant Secretary of Commerce and Technology for Virginia, the first dual cabinet role in the state's history.

Mayor Adrian Fenty appointed him on March 27, 2007 to the cabinet post of Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for the District of Columbia. Kundra worked on developing programs to spur open source and crowdsourced applications using publicly accessible Web services from the District of Columbia. Building on the work of Suzanne Peck, who preceded him as DC's CTO and created the D.C. Data Catalog, he used that data as the source material for an initiative called Apps for Democracy. The contest yielded 47 web, iPhone and Facebook applications from residents in 30 days. Mayor Fenty stated that the program cost the District "50 thousand dollars total and we estimate that we will save the district millions of dollars in program development costs". This cost-benefit was claimed by the DC government as savings in internal operational and contractual costs. Taking a page from Kundra this initiative is was mirrored by New York City's mayor Michael Bloomberg in launching a "BigApps" contest housed at NYC BigApps as well as New York City's DataMine. The city of San Francisco launched a data portal similar DC's in 2009.

Kundra won recognition for the project management system he implemented for the District government. The system imagined projects as publicly traded companies, project schedules as quarterly reports, and user satisfaction as stock prices. Buying or selling a stock corresponded to adding resources to a project or taking them away. The goal of management was to optimize the project portfolio for return on investment. The system effectively replaced subjective judgments about projects with objective, data driven analytics.

Kundra's efforts to use cloud-based web applications in the District government have also been considered innovative within government. Following the DC example driven by Kundra, the city of Los Angeles is now taking steps to adopt the cloud computing model for its IT needs. A DC spokeswoman said that the District of Columbia paid $479,560 for the Enterprise Google Apps license, which is $3.5 million less than what it had planned to spend on an alternative plan. Since its deployment in July 2008 Google Apps is available to 38,000 DC city employees, but only 1,000–2,000 are actively using Google Docs. Only 200 employees are actively using Gmail. In late 2010, hoping to spur use of Gmail, the city ran a pilot program, selecting about 300 users and having them use the Google product for three months. Google participated closely in the project, but Gmail ultimately didn't pass the "as good or better" test with the users, who preferred Exchange/Outlook. In July 2011, the General Services Administration (GSA) became the first federal agency to migrate its email services for 17,000 employees and contractors to the cloud-based Google Apps for Government, saving $15.2 million over 5 years. In January 2012, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) became the largest federal agency to migrate email and collaboration applications to the cloud, moving 25,000 employees to Google Apps for Government and saving 50% over the legacy Microsoft Exchange solution. As of July 2011, government agencies in 42 states are leveraging cloud-based messaging and collaboration services.

Kundra also moved the city's geographic information systems department to a middle school.