Vivek Kundra, Obama's CIO, visits Seattle Thursday

Imagine what it's like at a Porsche dealership when Bill Gates strolls in, asking to see what's new.

The same sort of thing is happening this week as Vivek Kundra, President Obama's chief information officer, visits the West Coast's top technology firms — including Microsoft, Google and Apple.

It's more than politics. The federal government is the world's biggest spender on information technology — the 2011 budget calls for $79 billion worth — and Kundra has pledged to ask tech companies not just for bids but ideas on how to improve and update its operations.

"One of the biggest reasons I'm here is to talk about and learn from the smartest people in the country when it comes to how they're using information technology, whether to serve their customers or constituencies," Kundra said by phone Wednesday, as he was driven from an event with San Francisco's mayor to Apple headquarters in Cupertino, Calif.

After his San Francisco tour, Kundra is coming to Seattle for a day Thursday beginning with breakfast at Microsoft with Chief Executive Steve Ballmer and other local executives.

Microsoft will show Kundra advanced research projects before he speaks at the University of Washington in the afternoon. He'll also meet with executives at Amazon.com before making an appearance at the Washington Technology Industry Association's awards dinner.

Until Obama hired him a year ago, Kundra was the IT administrator for the District of Columbia.

Ideas from public

Kundra, 35, has worked to bring federal data and IT programs online, solicited public input with Web systems and encouraged agencies to consolidate and share resources such as data centers.

He's also been controversial. Shortly after his appointment, he was put on leave after the FBI raided his former D.C. offices to investigate allegations of corruption at the organization. It was also revealed that Kundra had been caught shoplifting shirts in 1996 when he was 21 years old.

The White House characterized the misdemeanor as a "youthful indiscretion," and Kundra wasn't a subject or target of the raid, according to an Associated Press report at the time.

During Wednesday's interview, Kundra cited consumer Web technologies such as the Open Table reservation service, United Airlines' online reservations and YouTube as inspiration for the sort of convenience and accessibility he'd like to see offered by the federal government.

He also praised an online "cloud based" public-engagement tool from Seattle's IdeaScale that the federal government has used instead of building its own feedback system.

"One of the biggest problems we have within the federal government is, we spend billions of dollars and rely on the same old way of doing business with the same groups of people thinking about solutions that, frankly, have led to projects that have cost taxpayers billions of dollars and have not yielded the benefits that were promised upfront and left the federal government in a place where it's not serving the American people — it's inefficient, ineffective and has been unable to leverage the innovations that have happened in the consumer space," he said in a breath.

Asked about the pitfalls of the government using Web services built and run by companies such as Google that fund them with targeted advertising, Kundra said such concerns are being addressed, in part, via companies' privacy and service policies.

His organization and the General Services Administration, the agency that supports the functions of other federal agencies, focus on companies' terms of services, he said.

"These agreements ... talk not just about advertising, but policies around cookies and tracking ... making sure when the government makes services available in this context, the American people have a right to expect their privacy and security will be expected online," Kundra said.

Asked how to quantify changes to the federal technology empire, Kundra said, "the challenge is, it's actually cost avoidance," reducing the number of people maintaining a system, for instance.

Asked how Kundra's office will contribute to federal efforts to expand and improve broadband, he said that's being led by the Federal Communications Commission.

"One of the big areas that we're very involved in is the notion of teleworking," he said, noting that the General Accountability Office telecommuting policies worked especially well during the recent snowstorms.

"They've been in the leading position, yet the rest of the federal government has to change policies ... to make sure it can operate — whether there's a snowstorm or not," he said.

How can he avoid the appearance of having decisions about federal technology spending influenced by politics, especially with the administration having close relationships with certain tech executives?

'Competitive marketplace'

"It's all happening in a competitive marketplace," he said. "It's the General Services Administration that competes for these products and services."

By the time he pulled into the parking lot at Apple, Kundra hadn't mentioned a single Microsoft product.

How about Windows 7? Kundra said he's upgraded to the operating system "at a personal level" and "we're in a process right now" of creating a standard federal configuration of the operating system.

Brier Dudley: 206-515-5687 or bdudley@seattletimes.com