Shorts: Navy and Web 2.0, CMS Hurdles, CIO New Job or New Title?

Navy Considers Web 2.0 Tools. Navy officials want to adopt Web 2.0 tools such as Facebook and Wikipedia, but they will likely deploy their own versions of those technologies, said Robert Carey, the Navy Department’s chief information officer...."However, Web 2.0 technology is not designed for use in a strict command structure," Carey said. “It does flatten the organization, which makes us nervous because we’re not a flat organization, we are a rank organization,” he said. Read more on Federal Computer Week.

Obama Call for Citizen E-Participation Will Encounter Technical Hurdles. "Washington is abuzz about new possibilities for federal web publishing, but actually executing on a strategy of greater transparency combined with public participation will be difficult," notes CMS Watch founder Tony Byrne. "Web CMS vendors and Social Software suppliers can talk a good game about offering a unified solution to this challenge, but their architectures have not caught up with their marketing here." Byrne adds, "In particular, agencies will find that their existing Web CMS infrastructures are not up to the challenge of public participation." See more on CMSWatch.

Is CIO Gig New Position or New Title? [OMB] assured us that Kundra is, indeed, taking the Evans job, which since its creation in 2001 has sometimes been informally referred to as a "CIO" post. The e-Gov and IT chief is essentially responsible for coordinating government IT strategies across agencies, and chairs the federal CIO Council, comprising the CIOs of individual agencies. So is this just old wine in a new bottle—or at least a sexier label? Well, not exactly: apparently the CIO position is a distinct but "complementary" job within OMB, with a big-picturey mandate to transform the way government agencies use tech to interact with the public. In other words—or so it seems to me, anyway—it actually is the same job, but adding the CIO title reflects the broader scope and increased influence and prominence the administration expects Kundra to have, given that e-Gov head has traditionally been a fairly low-profile post. Read the entire post on ArsTechnia.