Jennifer Pahlka Hasn’t Given Up on Fixing the Government — The Information

It was in spring 2017 that Jennifer Pahlka, then a member of the Pentagon’s new Defense Innovation Board, found herself in a darkened U.S. military base watching a young analyst study aerial footage of a suspicious car. Well, the analyst was trying to parse the images: The Pentagon was relying on clunky, outdated software to highlight the vehicle’s path with a bounding red box that never seemed to keep up with the video. “I worked in the videogame industry in the ’90s,” Pahlka recalled to me recently, “and the graphics were better.”

Over nearly 15 years of dealing with the government, Pahlka has encountered many such moments, when critical U.S. institutions were using technology that fell woefully short of the country’s ambitions. It’s why she’s devoted her career to coaxing Washington toward greater digitization: as a deputy chief technology officer during the Obama administration and as the founder of Code for America, a San Francisco–based nonprofit that gathers technologists to advise local governments. The stakes are usually lower than wartime maneuvers, but she believes that antiquated government IT is far costlier than lawmakers, or the American public, fully realizes.

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/jennifer-pahlka-hasnt-given-up-on-big-government