When I read about Vivek Kundra being appointed Federal CTO, I raised an eyebrow, my right one to be exact. I liked all the fresh things he had done to shake up the information systems and business as usual in Washington, DC. I consoled myself with the thought that maybe his appointment was all part of the new agenda of change. Out with the old and all that.

My reservations were not that he was a little young at age 34, but only that he had no enterprise management experience. Vivek Kundra is bright, well educated and politically ambitious. He has run technology startups and given blood to help a non-profit organization like Washington DC be more responsive to the needs of the district by getting more info online. These qualities make his resume sparkle, but where’s the beef when it comes to large enterprise systems? Management is what the CTO job is all about. In this day and age, business and IT risk go hand in hand.

Running a city or a state government is nothing like running the systems he would impact as CTO of the US. Think about the level of interoperability that would challenge any one in charge of government IT--think IRS, postal service, Medicaid, Pentagon, Social Security payments, EPA, Army Corp of Engineers, and the list goes on. In contrast, Washington DC has shallow legacy information systems in comparison to the systems that might come under the national CTO’s purview.

Granted, the CTO job for Vivek Kundra was principally going to be the website to chart the impact of the recovery spending. For that job, he was a great choice. And a logical place for the current administration to start when creating a position at the federal level that had never been important before. He would architect interoperability around a specific project--how recovery funds are spent.

But what this country needs is something more than a politician who, by the way, is a tech whiz. What this country needs is a vision and a game plan and someone with the technology credibility and business acumen to pull it off. Creating new technology systems from scratch is one thing, but "google-izing" government computing with all its legacy systems means people have to work differently. And the one thing we know about managing technology so that it works, is that the job is as much technology as it is management.

Last week when the word came out that the new CTO had been oblivious to the fraud perpetrated by his direct reports, my doubts about his management skills were unfortunately confirmed. If Mr. Kundra was not looking at the money and the vendor relationships, he was not understanding the basics of running a technology business and managing a budget on a relatively minor scale. He was selling the sizzle, but the beef was rotten. I see Vivek Kundra as a kind of Hamlet in this morality play. Maybe he misplaced his trust—but if the FBI knew about the fraud and the sting, why didn’t he notice anything wrong? And the FBI did not trust him enough to bring him into the process? The word that comes to mind is “amateur.” This happened on his watch.

President Obama and his administration “get technology” more than any previous administration. Technology spending is a critical part of the recovery agenda. But we need more than a technology ombudsman to head up the technology strategy for the United States government. We need a technology ambassador with large systems management experience at bat--someone with an eye on the ball and a good batting average. And, sad but true, we need someone who has been out after dark and knows to anticipate what might be lurking in the shadows.