We recently took a look at the wide variety of municipal IT structures in an effort to gain a better understanding of how governments perceive the role of technology in their operations. We also looked into some of the different titles and roles of the people who lead those departments. They have the opportunity to shape how information and data are shared with the public.

Research into local government IT structures and leadership could have started anywhere and could have lasted a very long time. We gathered ideas from several existing resources, making sure to include municipalities of all sizes across the country. Our list is by no means comprehensive -- but that’s where you come in.

How does your city structure its IT efforts? Are there links that illustrate this? Please feel free to add them to our doc! We've made our research public and editable, and we're looking forward to seeing what other examples are added.

The branch of municipal government that oversees technology and shares information with the public plays a vital role in keeping citizens connected, informed, and empowered. It goes by many names -- Information Technology Department, Office of Innovation and Technology, Communications and Information Office -- but whatever you call it, understanding its authority and functions is key to understanding how a government perceives the role of technology in its own operations and has implications for how a locality structures and enforces its open data policies.

The leaders of these departments are often tasked with helping municipalities craft a vision and goals for sharing information with the public. How cities structure their IT departments (whatever name those departments may go by) and what roles the leaders of those departments play gives us a better understanding of how local governments might approach sharing data.

Some cities are clearer than others about how much agency is vested in the IT leader.

In Chicago, data is made available through an extensive portal and the Department of Innovation and Technology works to connect the public to government information by coordinating data disclosure with other departments, as mandated through the city’s 2012 Open Data Executive Order. This Order also tasks a Chief Data Officer and Chief Information Officer with working together on releasing data to the public. The creation of these positions was accompanied by the release of 21 more city datasets with the promise of more to come.

In New York City, another municipal government that makes large amounts of data available through a central portal, a Chief Digital Officer and Chief Information and Innovation Officer are both tasked with duties relevant to how information is shared with the public. They have already started working together on gathering ideas for reinventing the city's aging payphones to act more like public information portals, as just one example of their collaboration.

Titles chosen for IT leaders, like the titles for the IT departments, are what cities make them to be. Though the names and specifics of the roles vary, the potential influence is the same: These roles are increasingly vested with opportunities to shape open data initiatives that can better inform the public. How that power is managed -- and whether the people at the reins are supplied with the authority and resources to make meaningful change -- play a deciding role in the depth, creativity, and breadth of a city’s open data disclosure in ways that we have yet to see fully play out.

Though an increasing number of municipal governments have chosen to create a CIO or CTO-like position to steer their IT policies, others have chosen a commission or board structure to hold the same authority. For example, Ann Arbor, Michigan, has a Technology Leadership Board that helps "advise and assist the Director of IT in guiding IT investments and management." By contrast, many smaller municipalities manage their IT needs with the limited resources at hand, relying entirely on one-person IT departments or enlisting a clerk, secretary, or other record keeper to take on this responsibility. Still others choose to work with other cities or with their county for IT services, sharing a singular set department across a few government bodies. This is especially true in consolidated city-county governments.

How any IT leadership role plays out -- whether it's filled by a CIO, an IT Director, a commission or a clerk -- depends in part on the input, support, and guidance that that position receives from other knowledgeable sources inside and outside of government. No matter who leads a local government's technology policy, acknowledging their ability to steer open data policies that act in the public's best interest is an important step toward starting a dialogue about what those policies might look like.

The White House blog today featured a new post about the "Building Blocks of a 21st Century Digital Government." If these are the building blocks of reinvented government, however, we're on shaky ground.

Most agency CIOs don't know what their agency's major IT holdings are. Really. Decisions determining what data will be released, and how it gets released, are routinely made by individual departments, outside public view, and without review from the federal CIO or CTO, Congress, or the public.

This is a shame, because the $80 Billion+ federal IT budget contains a wealth of vital information, and should be considered a national asset, deserving thoughtful consideration. Instead, the identity of the major information holdings of the US government are still essentially opaque, even to the government officials supposedly in charge of managing them (with only a few exceptions).

Unfortunately, the major information policies of the Obama administration have all punted on this essential point. Transformative open data policy isn't just about APIs and data portals.

This is frustrating because the White House is clearly spending an enormous amount of time and attention on the Federal Strategy, and doing some fantastic, innovative work. The GSA's data stream of agency progress on the new requirements is an exciting new way for the White House to track compliance on explicit requirements (even if some of them are redundant with existing requirements). And the new Innovation Fellows program shows an administration clearly receptive to new ideas and personalities, who will inevitably make some progress facing important challenges.

But there's still a glaring, glaring omission. This strategy still doesn't address existing information that isn't open, and it doesn't empower federal managers or anyone else to get new access to existing information. When the White House says "open up" they mean "build apis," not release information for the first time.

Well formed federal transparency policy has to be built on a circumspect, comprehensive foundation, with knowledge of all major information holdings.

Government information policy can't be about opt-in, voluntary policies that encourage agencies to try some new things. Ultimately, that's what the Federal IT policy preserves: the status quo, where agencies pick comfortable data to release, often without even knowing what they have to choose from.

You can't manage what you can't see.

President Obama ended the months of speculation surrounding his creation and appointment of the first federal Chief Technology Officer (CTO) by appointing Virginia Secretary of Technology Aneesh Chopra. Chopra's selection was praised across the Web. Sunlight's John Wonderlich saw Chopra speak last year and wrote up his thoughts on him here. The video of that talk is below (h/t John Wonderlich and Jon Henke):

And this is the President's announcement appointing Chopra as the first federal CTO. (The announcement comes towards the end.)

As we wait for Obama to name his new CTO, some encouraging news on the federal IT front is breaking. Candi Harrison, writes at her blog that Bev Godwin, director of USA.gov, will be joining the White House as director of online resources and interagency development on the New Media Team.  Candi writes that Bev knows the Web manager community, and she will bring that knowledge to the table when decisions are being made. “You couldn’t have a better, more savvy and more capable advocate,” she writes. “This is great news.’

Nancy Scola at Tech President concurs. “With this and other appointments, team Obama is turning the White House into social media's center of gravity in Washington, which is a distinct change from the past.” And Craig Newmark is also excited. “I, for one, welcome our new (Web content) nerd overlords.”

Let us second (third? fourth?) these acclamations for this appointment. We've worked with Bev a little and she and her GSA team have been focused, savvy, and smart about the institutional barriers they will confront as they try to fulfill the President's promises on transparency, open government and collaboration.

Following up on Ellen's post about the federal CTO, here's what President Obama has said or written during his campaign about the CTO.

From the excellent CRS report on the CTO position, we can see then-candidate Obama's description of the position from his technology position paper:

Bring Government into the 21st Century: Barack Obama will use technology to reform government and improve the exchange of information between the federal government and citizens while ensuring the security of our networks. Obama believes in the American people and in their intelligence, expertise, and ability and willingness to give and to give back to make government work better. Obama will appoint the nation’s first Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to ensure that our government and all its agencies have the right infrastructure, policies and services for the 21st century. The CTO will ensure the safety of our networks and will lead an interagency effort, working with chief technology and chief information officers of each of the federal agencies, to ensure that they use best-in-class technologies and share best practices. The CTO will have a specific focus on transparency, by ensuring that each arm of the federal government makes its records open and accessible as the E-Government Act requires. The CTO will also focus on using new technologies to solicit and receive information back from citizens to improve the functioning of democratic government. The CTO will also ensure technological interoperability of key government functions. For example, the Chief Technology Officer will oversee the development of a national, interoperable wireless network for local, state and federal first responders as the 9/11 commission recommended. This will ensure that fire officials, police officers and [emergency medical technicians] from different jurisdictions have the ability to communicate with each other during a crisis and we do not have a repeat of the failure to deliver critical public services that occurred in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

The same paper also cites Change.gov:

Bring Government into the 21st Century: Use technology to reform government and improve the exchange of information between the federal government and citizens while ensuring the security of our networks. Appoint the nation’s first Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to ensure the safety of our networks and lead an interagency effort, working with chief technology and chief information officers of each of the federal agencies, to ensure that they use best-in-class technologies and share best practices.

Looking through Change We Can Believe In, (subtitled Barack Obama's Plan to Renew America's Promise), we can see the following similar passage, on page 88:

Barack Obama will use technology to reform government and improve the exchange of information between the federal government and citizens while ensuring the security of our networks.  To that end, he will appoint the nation's first Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to ensure that our government and all its agencies have the right infrastructure, policies, and services for the twenty-first century.  The CTO will ensure the safety of our networks and will lead an interagency effort, working with chief technology and chief information officers of each of the federal agencies to ensure that they use best-in-class technologies and share best practices.

If you know of other official mentions of the CTO position from the campaign, the transition, or from the White House, we'd love to hear them in the comments.

On his second day in office, President Barack Obama issued a sweeping memorandum on transparency in government, setting out an ambitious to-do list for the newly created position of Chief Technology Officer (CTO). This person was to be responsible initially -- along with the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Administrator of General Services Administration -- to come up with a concrete list of recommendations to implement the principles set out in the memorandum, namely, that government should be transparent, participatory, and collaborative, and to do it within 120 days.

We're now at day 21 and counting , and the Obama Administration has yet to appoint that CTO -- a position he promised to create during his campaign.

So I'm worried: the clock is ticking to prepare that critically important memo. And besides the ticking clock there have been several examples of the White House  falling down on its promises to be transparent, particularly complying with its promise to post all legislation online for 5 days before consideration. (The history of posting bills online to allow for public comment has been either non-existent or spotty to date.) Getting that CTO "online" seems more and more important every day. To walk the walk, Obama needs the CTO.

So what's going on? Inquiring minds want to know.

Christopher Dorobek, managing editor of Federal News Radio and author of DorobekInsider.com, is reporting that they’ve confirmed that President Obama is set to name the immensely talented Vivek Kundra, Washington, D.C., government’s CTO, as the next administrator of e-government and information technology within the Office of Management and Budget. Good news indeed.

But a whole lot of questions remain as to how the whole picture will be painted.

For instance, there are currently three White House IT-related positions, with a fourth being the proposed CTO. The administration has done little to explain what the various IT offices have responsibility over. Dorobek writes that he sees four pockets of government IT expertise: A Congressional Research Service report, published last month,  illustrates  how “murky” things remain and how the four key positions on this arena -- the e-government administrator at OMB; OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs; the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; and the proposed Obama CTO will divide up responsibilities and work together.

Dorobek says: “Frankly, one of the problems has been that there hasn’t been enough of a coordinated, strategic approach to technology, information technology and data, and this seems like an opportune time to make all those lines clear.”

Dorobek points to NextGov’s Jill Atoro as suggesting that Virginia’s secretary of technology, Aneesh Chopra , might be Obama’s CTO pick.

Staying tuned here.