One of the sessions from last month’s Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco featured a discussion of cloud computing with Padmasree Warrior of Cisco and Shane Robinson of HP.
It’s a fairly extensive discussion, but with more people in the tech community talking about the reality of a federal-level CTO, one of the questions posed to them was what advice they would offer to the person who would assume such a post. Warrior approached this question from an educational platform and mentioned that she would encourage more multi-disciplinary collaboration; in essence, problems are too complex to cordon off as solvable only by this or that department. Fortunately, there have been many universities who have been (or are) moving in this direction. A few examples that come to mind are MIT’s Media Lab, Penn State’s College of Information Sciences & Technology and Carnegie Mellon’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences.