Photo: Google's Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf

Even before Barack Obama's election as president on Nov. 4, speculation had begun about who might be his chief technology officer (CTO). By the end of November, the guessing game was in full swing, with a raft of IT industry titans purportedly in the running to be the nation's new IT czar.

Obama signaled his intention to name a national CTO in an eight-page Technology and Innovation Plan posted on his Web site. The CTO would oversee federal government IT infrastructure and policies, promote government transparency, lead development of a national interoperable wireless network for first responders and promote technology-related economic development.

Among the names circulating for the new post are Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Amazon.com CEO Jeffrey Bezos. But as some observers have pointed out, hard-charging Internet executives may not be the best fit for the job.

As any number of current and former government CIOs will tell you, the transition from private sector to public sector is often jarring. Private-sector transplants tend be shocked at the amount of politics and bureaucracy they encounter in government. It's not that they can't succeed; indeed, many of today's most successful government CIOs have a mix of public- and private-sector experience. But placing an entrepreneurial Internet CEO in the middle of the nation's most complex bureaucracy could be a recipe for frustration, if not disaster.

Tod Newcombe, editor of Public CIO, Government Technology's sister publication, accurately pointed out in a recent Web editorial that a national CTO must understand the inner workings of government just as well as he or she understands technology.

Two Potential Nominees?

With that in mind, two names in the rumor mill stand out: Vivek Kundra, CTO of Washington, D.C., and Vint Cerf, Google's chief Internet evangelist. Kundra is rumored to be advising Obama's transition team. And Cerf is on Obama's shortlist of potential CTOs, according to a recent Business Week magazine report.

Both men have talked extensively with Government Technology over the past 18 months. And both could bring valuable skills and experience to the post.

In less than two years, 33-year-old Kundra has established himself as one of government's most forward-thinking CIOs. He's drawn widespread attention for adopting hosted applications and applying low-cost Web 2.0 tools to government tasks.

"Look at what we did with our most recent procurement around project management," Kundra said in an April 2008 interview. "We decided to go with the cloud model instead of buying a ton of servers that would have taken six or seven months to procure, configure and deploy. We were able to do that immediately. When we look at the platform in terms of collaboration, everything is going to be in the cloud. And as we look at the whole data center model, the question really becomes, one, why do we need a data center? And, two, what are such critical applications