Vivek Kundra (born October 9, 1974) is a former American administrator who served as the first chief information officer of the United States from March, 2009 to August, 2011 under President Barack Obama.

He moved to Tanzania with his family at the age of one, when his father joined a group of professors and teachers to provide education to local residents.

[5] Kundra is currently the chief operating officer at Sprinklr, a provider of enterprise customer experience management software based in NYC.

Governor Tim Kaine appointed Kundra in January 2006 to the post of Assistant Secretary of Commerce and Technology for Virginia, the first dual cabinet role in the state's history.

Mayor Adrian Fenty appointed him on March 27, 2007, to the cabinet post of chief technology officer (CTO) for the District of Columbia.

Kundra worked on developing programs to spur open source and crowdsourced applications using publicly accessible Web services from the District of Columbia.

[16] In late 2010, hoping to spur use of Gmail, the city ran a pilot program, selecting about 300 users and having them use the Google product for three months.

According to President Obama, as Chief Information Officer, Kundra "will play a key role in making sure our government is running in the most secure, open, and efficient way possible".

[31] Data.gov draws conceptual parallels from the DC Data Catalog launched by Kundra when he was CTO of Washington, D.C., where he published vast amounts of datasets for public use.

Immediately after the Data.gov launch, the Apps for America[32] contest by the Sunlight Foundation challenged the American people to develop innovative solutions using Data.gov.

[38] On June 30, 2009, at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York,[39] Vivek Kundra, unveiled the IT Dashboard that tracks over $76 billion in Federal IT spending.

Kundra launched the federal government strategy and the cloud computing portal Apps.gov at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field in California, on September 15, 2009.

Kundra saw the cloud as an alternative to hardware investments, as means to reduce IT costs, and to shift focus of federal IT from infrastructure management to strategic projects.

[48] On December 9, 2010, Kundra published the "25 Point Implementation Plan to Reform Federal Information Technology Management", which included Cloud First as one of its top priorities for achieving IT efficiency.

[49] He announced his decision to leave the federal government and join Harvard University within 7 months of this strategy, too short for any of cloud first initiatives to have demonstrated cost savings.

[51] Of 38 projects reviewed, four have been canceled,[52] 11 have been rescoped, and 12 have cut the time for delivery of functionality down by more than half, from two to three years down to an average of 8 months, achieving a total of $3 billion in lifecycle budget reductions, according to whitehouse.gov

[63] In May 2011, Kundra was selected by EMC Corporation for their Data Hero Visionary Award for his pioneering work under the Obama administration to reform how the federal government manages and uses information technology.

[65] Kundra was awarded the 2010 National Cyber Security Leadership Award[66] by the SANS Institute for uncovering more than $300 million each year in wasted federal spending on ineffective certification and accreditation reporting and demonstrating an alternative approach called "continuous monitoring" that provides more effective security for federal systems at lower costs.

The system measured project performance and allocated IT investments similar to the way the public companies trade on the stock market.