The survey of 174 federal IT pros was conducted in August 2011 at the MeriTalk Innovation Nation forum, six months after Kundra’s resignation.

“Vivek’s tenure … was like a bottle of champagne — seems like a great idea, exciting start, but the plan’s unclear, and the next morning you wake up with the same problems and a sore head,” said Steve O’Keeffe, founder, MeriTalk. The firm has presented its findings to Steven VanRoekel, Kundra’s replacement.

The feds supported Kundra’s initiatives, but said timing, funding and conflicting mandates made it impossible to carry them out, according to O’Keeffe. Kundra placed a heavy emphasis on modernizing infrastructure spending on IT, which he said soaked up $19 billion per year out of the approximately $70 billion federal IT budget.

While the majority of federal IT professionals (71%) believe Vivek Kundra made a significant impact while in office and credit his vision as his greatest strength, the study revealed that top challenges under Kundra included lack of funding to fulfill mandates (59%), conflicting mandates (44%) and unrealistic goals/mandates (41%). When asked to vote on the three most important priorities for the new federal CIO, respondents said:

Reduce the number of mandates and conflicting mandates (60%)
Reassess goals/timelines to make success attainable (53%)
Listen to feedback/counsel from IT operations (46%)

According to the study, 92% of feds believe cloud is a good idea for federal IT, but just 29% are following the administration’s mandated “Cloud First” policy. And almost half (42%) say they are adopting a “wait-and-see” approach related to cloud. Respondents cite numerous challenges including security issues (64%), cultural issues (36%) and budget constraints (36%) as barriers to cloud computing.

Almost all feds (95%) also vote for data center consolidation, although the majority (70%) say federal agencies will not be able to eliminate the mandated 800 data centers by 2015. Respondents do anticipate realizing savings from their data center consolidation efforts, with most (74%) estimating the federal government can save at least $75 million overall. Respondents acknowledge, however, that investment is needed — 85% say Feds will not realize data center savings without new investment.

When it comes to cyber security, respondents unanimously agreed threats have increased in the last year (100% say yes). Feds say the most important priorities for cyber security going forward are: securing federal networks (68%), critical infrastructure protection (56%) and privacy protection (36%). However, feds say funding to meet these priorities is, on average, 41% short. Further, feds are unclear who owns cyber security, highlighting a leadership vacuum.

Everything to date has either been a science project–apps.gov, hosting data.gov’s front end at Terremark, NASA Nebula, etc– or a bunch of fluff and boosterism, and his promised cloud computing budgets haven’t hit the boards yet, so up until now, it was business as usual. I’ll bet agency CIOs were spending most of the time figuring out how to ignore Kundra and laughing up their sleeves at him.

This changes things. Recovery.gov is a whole project, soup to nuts, running out in the cloud, not just a little peice of an IT project or a single process outsourced. It’s a deliberate, pointed enjoinder that he can get something done in Washington (even if it’s just a website) by going around, rather than through, the normal people.

Technology-wise, this is nothing- the choice of Amazon incidental at best, the money absolute peanuts.

Process-wise, it’s a very public slap in the face to the IT managers and contractors at the fed. It’s absolutely humiliating and horrible for them- every conversation they have for the next year is going to include, “But recovery.gov…” and they know it. If they can’t find a way to squash Kundra, the IT incumbents are in for some scary, fast changes in how they do business.

Federal contractors and government employees HATE that- it’s the opposite of ‘gravy train’. The system isn’t designed to be competitive; it’s designed to soak up money. Kundra is effectively going to force them to be competitive by rubbing their nose in that fact.

What it shows on a larger level is something worth remembering; cloud computing isn’t a technological breakthrough as much as it is a process breakthrough. Cloud users may find it neat that Amazon can do what it does with Xen, for example, but fundamentally, they don’t care that much, they’re just there to get the fast, cheap, no-commitment servers and use them. And that’s what Kundra’s done with Recovery.gov (Ok, he picked a contractor do did it, but anyway).

There are probably thousands of federal IT suppliers that could have built and run Recovery.gov, and they would have taken their sweet time about it, and milked the coffers dry in the process, because that’s the normal process. They might have bought servers, rented space to run them, put a nice 50% (or more) margin on their costs, and delivered the site when they couldn’t duck the contract any more. That’s normal.

Kundra picking out a contractor who simply went around all that and bought IT at Amazon, cutting the projected costs and delivery time into ribbons?

That’s not normal-and that’s why cloud computing is so important.