Nation Gets Its First CTO

President Obama today announced his choice for the nation's first chief technology officer, bringing a months-long guessing game to an end with a pick that virtually no one saw coming.

Aneesh Chopra, Virginia's Secretary of Technology, landed the job. In his weekly Internet and radio address, Obama said the new position aims to "promote technological innovation to help achieve our most urgent priorities -- from creating jobs and reducing healthcare costs to keeping our nation secure."

Obama said that Chopra will work closely with White House CIO Vivek Kundra, who oversees the government's technology budget and internal IT policies.

Both positions are creations of the Obama administration, and stand as further evidence of the importance the president places on technology. After running an impressively tech-savvy campaign, Obama has pledged to use the Web to make more government information easily accessible to the public.

If you remember, the Kundra appointment as CIO hit a snag when, during the first week of his new White House job, the the FBI raided the offices Kundra until recently had run as CTO of the District of Columbia. A staff IT security expert and outside consultant were arrested as part of a bribery investigation. Though Kundra was not a target of the investigation, he took a brief leave of absence while the probe continued, returning to his new job not long after.

I wrote at the time that, just to be safe, Obama should find a replacement for Kundra. But that hasn't happened and it appears everyone's just moving forward. I don't know what I have to do to get the president to listen to me. Maybe follow him on Twitter. I just hope everything works out.

In any event, here's some more on the new federal CTO:

Chopra, who previously served as managing director of the hospital consulting Advisory Board Company, is a largely unknown figure in Silicon Valley. Obama was widely expected to pick a top gun in the industry, with figures like Google's Eric Schmidt and Vint Cerf, Microsoft's Bill Gates and Cisco's Padmasree Warrior topping many people's shortlists.

In his four years heading Virginia's technology efforts, Chopra worked extensively on health IT issues, which Obama has repeatedly said ranks as a high priority for his administration.

Chopra also worked to craft public-private partnerships to bring technical expertise from firms like Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) inside the walls of government.

Under Chopra's direction, Virginia was one of the first states to partner with Google to implement its site-map protocols across the Web sites of the state's roughly 90 agencies. 

Chopra holds a master's degree in public policy from Harvard and a bachelor's degree in public health from Johns Hopkins.