California’s CTO Responds To Our Challenge With His Own: Give CA Your Best IT Ideas

Editor's note: In a pair of posts a couple of weeks ago, contributing columnist Vivek Wadhwa highlighted the antiquated nature of the state of California's IT systems and the way contracts for those systems are doled out to legacy IT firms. He then challenged Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to come up with ways to rebuild California's IT systems at one tenth the cost. California CTO P.K. Agarwal responds in this guest post with his own challenge: walk the talk and give him your best IT ideas. He's even set up a crowdsourcing site to gather them. Vivek, I’m glad to see you are challenging the readers of TechCrunch the same way you challenge the audiences of your speeches. The debate that has erupted on TechCrunch in response to that challenge is particularly interesting to me because it focuses on a question that my colleagues and I have spent a lot of time trying to find an answer to: What’s the best way to migrate California’s legacy portfolio to new technologies? And there are many other related questions.