White House CIO even less credible

  Last week I lambasted the White House CIO and her staff as not being credible in leading the Bush Administration's Federal Desktop Core Configuration initiative. I wrote that until the White House IT staff was held accountable for failing to comply with the Presidential Records Act, other government CIOs needn't bother complying with the FDCC. I got a little flak among the blog's respondents and even an anonymous voicemail suggesting I was being "political."

I was going to let the matter drop until I had a chat yesterday with David Gewirtz. He's the editor in chief of ZATZ Publishing in Palm Bay, Fla. and the author of Where Have All the Emails Gone?, which goes into depth about the missing 5 million messages during the first half of the Bush Administration. Gewirtz is open to the idea it could all be a simple mistake. "Never underestimate the ability for people to have just done something dumb," he says, posing an explanation how IT staff could have botched archiving 1,000 or so days of e-mail. He doesn't argue that a conspiracy or even incompetence was involved. "I'm not a mind reader," he says.

However, when Theresa Payton, who took over the CIO post in 2006 after the e-mail archiving fiasco was discovered, testified last week to Congress about the mess, she undermined her own credibility to me and Gewirtz by estimating it would cost the White House $50,000 to restore a single archive tape and $500,000 for the servers. Gewirtz makes mincemeat of this ludicrous assertion. In a recent newsletter, he writes, "I don't begrudge the government spending my tax dollars....But what I do object to is using the inaccurate and inflated claim of excessive cost as a reason to avoid compliance with the Presidential Records Act."

What's more Payton does not correct Republican Congressman Darrell Issa's deriding of Lotus Notes as being akin to "Betamax" and "wagon wheel" technology. Unless, of course, the White House CIO is so clueless that she does think IBM's flagship messaging technology is that outmoded; in which case, how she got her job is beyond anyone's guess, unless incompetence is a job requirement to work in the Bush White House.

We all know the Security and Exchange Commission would not cut a CIO the same slack if it were investigating a bank for alleged financial shenanigans and had demanded e-mails from five or six years ago. If the bank's CIO said, "Hey, it's not my fault. It happened during the previous CIO's tenure and it's too costly to retrieve them." That excuse probably would get the CIO fired, if not indicted for obstruction of justice.

And what's absolutely galling about the situation is that White House CIO who did oversee this mess claimed his work in updating the Administration's infrastructure and business continuity systems, of which e-mail has to be a vital component, was a "tremendous achievement."

Yeah? For whom?