President Obama has named a high tech guru to the position of Chief Information Officer of the United States. Vivek Kundra, who is currently the Chief Technology Officer for Washington, DC will be the first person to hold such a position. His budget for the department is reportedly 70 billion dollars, and his departmental responsibilities include overseeing technology in the U.S. His department will study how technology can be utilized and implemented in order to increase productivity, gain efficiency, and reduce costs of governmental agencies.

When Kundra assumes his role, he will decide which technologies the Obama administration will use to govern and how they will be deployed. Reportedly, he is a champion of multiple social network sites such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Presidents Obama made the following statement about Kundra:

“I have directed him to work to ensure that we are using the spirit of American innovation and the power of technology to improve performance and lower the cost of government operations.”

In a speech after his appointment, Kundra stated that he wanted to ensure the U.S. has “the ability to run an open, transparent, participatory and collaborative government” and that he would explore how government could use so-called “cloud computing”, involving much greater reliance on web-based resources.

He has also planned to create a data.gov website through which U.S. citizens would gain much easier access to official statistics and other government information.

Vivek Kundra was born in Delhi, India before immigrating, at a young age, to Tanzania. His family later moved to the U.S. when Kundra was 11 where he grew up in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

At the University of Maryland, Kundra earned a degree in psychology and a masters degree in information technology. Also, he has graduated from the University of Virginia’s Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership.

Kundra has been heralded as one of the top 25 CTO’s in the country and as the 2008 IT Executive of the Year by InfoWorld for his projects to drive transparency, include citizens in government processes, and lower the cost of government operations. Kundra has already made his mark as a freethinker, capabable of affecting change. He was able to instate Google Apps as the tool of choice for fire departments and other agencies.