Vivek Kundra, the head of Salesforce's public sector and the former White House CIO, shared thoughts on the question of build or buy in the federal government IT in a diginomica article.
Mr. Kundra fell on the side of using cloud computing over building too much technology, according to the report.
"The wrong approach in my mind is anyone that thinks that they are going to be able to future-proof their investments — you just can't. One of the reasons is that when I was in government I realized a lot of government agencies unfortunately were becoming IT departments, in terms of how they're managing their infrastructure and technology. It's not their job to run a multimillion dollar IT department. The problem is that most governments end up buying technology the way they buy buildings. You can't buy in the technology world and assume things are going to be frozen in time for the next 50 years," he said in the report.
"Anyone that tells you that doesn't know what they are talking about. That is one of the reasons I advanced the 'cloud first' policy — you see what happens when government is managing everything, you can't hire the best engineers and compete with the best technology companies in the world. You're not going to be able to attract the talent and keep the talent on a long-term basis," Mr. Kundra said in the report. "Are there cases where you are going to be able to do that? Absolutely. But as a broad policy I think it's a big mistake."