John C. Dvorak's accusation that Obama appointee to the US CIO role, Vivek Kundra, is a phony seems to be mostly a flash in the pan so far but it seems like the sort of thing that the mainstream media might pick up on just for shock value so I am getting the popcorn ready.

Dvorak's primary knock against the guy seems to be that he doesn't sound like a geek, which I would argue is a positive characteristic in a CIO. Many CIOs don't come from a particularly geeky tech background in the first place (CTOs are a different story)... many have ended up in the role from the business side of the house and are not, and don't need to be, particularly technical.

After laying out his suspicion Dvorak goes looking for evidence; a masters degree from a satellite campus, a claim to be CEO of what in fact was a one-person company, missing or not easily acquired information on a claimed degree in biology. Taken as a whole, together with the minimal effort that Dvorak put into finding all this out, it's the sort of thing I wouldn't think Kundra would even bother to respond to... certainly not if he actually knows the credentials exist. Others will do the digging and Dvorak will go back into the closet for a while. White House comments so far seem appropriate: "If you are going to make such charges, make sure you call us and take the time to educate yourself." It isn't Kundra's job to satisfy Dvorak on this matter (if his vetters in the administration and with the FBI didn't already satisfy Obama before Kundra was appointed, we all have worse problems); as a member of the press, rather, it's Dvorak's role to get out and do some hard digging to find the facts. But so far his shovel seems unsoiled.

Chris Curran explored this matter in a more general context when he posted on the difficulty of ascertaining CIO bona fides in the online world. Reading that post before Dvorak's, the idea struck me as a little incongruous; a bit like complaining about the difficulty of sorting out actual trash collectors from impostor trash collectors, or as Sean Connery's Irish cop character puts it to Kevin Costner's Elliot Ness character in "The Untouchables" when he doesn't feel a need to check Ness' credentials as an IRS agent, "Who would claim to be that, if they were not?" In a time when the stock of the average CIO is again falling (more and more are finding themselves wedged into the accounting department again, a lackey for the CFO rather than powerful strategic thinker for the company) and are having trouble being taken seriously as Google and Apple make them look bad, how pathetic would it be to try to masquerade as one to join an industry group?

Kundra, a federal employee responsible for the allocation of billions of tax dollars, may be a different matter, but it seems as if Dvorak has been supping too often with conspiracy theorist (and his co-host of the No Agenda podcast) Adam Curry. I see little in the article that doesn't scream "Didn't do enough research" which is perhaps acceptable in a blogger but doesn't really cut it for a journalist like Dvorak. He seems to have made a few phone calls and taken an absence of easily acquired evidence as a sign that none is available whatsoever, and mis-interpreted other of what he found as having significance it does not. Most of this was cleared up in about five minutes by real journalists doing actual research.

The best Dvorak has done is latch on to some obvious polishing. If Kundra in fact inflated other parts of his resume, I'm not going to defend the guy, but I will say there is a certain market pressure to do so in this industry, aside from the normal reasons one might do it. The famous HR job postings such as "Need developer with five years Java experience" that came out when the language was only a year old are a good example of how techies are often forced by PHB logic to falsify resumes in order to get jobs. The ever-changing nature of the industry is also a factor, something that many non-technical hiring managers will never understand. Things change so fast that you are constantly learning along the way. As a friend of mine once put it, "I've never been qualified for a job I have been hired for until after I got it." Your ultimate qualification in the IT industry is being able to learn, because what you already know in terms of technology is going to change; but there is no easy way to assert that qualification on a resume.

There are also simply different perspectives on what a CIO is and does which might leave many qualifications open to question. Curran cites in his experience the problem of people self-identifying as CIOs who work at small businesses or who are primarily consultants who advise or work with CIOs. It's understandable that the industry group he was participating in didn't want such members, being oriented toward the enterprise, but does that make them less CIOs? Bill Gates was "President" of Microsoft when it had all of nine people... was that title a joke, or his qualifications dubious? Big things happen in small companies in this industry. Personally, I am more inclined to evaluate people based on their actual contributions rather than the letters after their name, but that may just be the actual tech in me running up against the more mainstream stance that these folks, supposedly tech industry insiders, are in fact offering. I've never known actual ground-level geeks to put much stock in anything other than what you could deliver; excessive body hair, all manner of odors, compulsive lying, and everything else goes out the door as a consideration once you encounter someone truly capable.

At the same time, we're all liable to be initially judgemental. Dvorak's most revealing statement may be this:

I first suspected something was fishy about this fellow by listening to him on CSPAN where he simply did not sound like someone who studied computers or technology. His common referrals to Twitter and Google Docs as some sort of high-tech breakthroughs and a way to save money and empower the public stemmed from pure cornball pop culture and the blogosphere, not from computer science or Information technology.

I haven't listened an awful lot to Kundra, so I can't say what he sounds like. But John's curmudgeonly take on Twitter and Google Docs is old news, and I think he is inclined to view anyone singing their praises in a negative light, even to the extent of assuming they are touting them as "high-tech breakthroughs" when in fact they are indeed breakthroughs of a different sort: low-tech, almost. They are the Tang to IT's NASA; a practical application useful to non-technical people. And the special remit of the CIO, in my opinion, lies not in developing or praising technical breakthroughs (that being the realm of the CTO), but rather in searching out and lauding usability breakthroughs. If Kundra can do that with the federal government IT infrastructure, more power to him, whether he was a one-man show CEO at Creostar or not.