One of the people this administration plans to hire: . The person selected will be the nation's first chief technology officer.

From the job description, the CTO job does not sound exciting, and may well have been copied from an IT management 101 textbook. It says the job of the CTO will be to lead federal IT and "ensure that they use best-in-class technologies and ."

Paul Strassman, a former CIO of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and Defense Department's Director of Defense Information, said what the administration has to do first is to define its management issues and information policy and then the technology will follow. "The question is --what are the objectives that are is he trying to achieve?" Strassman said.

One thing that Obama does want is what has been called a . That involves improving the transparency and access to the vast oceans of government data, in part, by moving this data into universally accessible formats. Many federal agencies have put data online, but use different formats.

And who will be the CTO to lead this effort? The media rumor mill has cited just about every single big name in tech, including , who met with Obama Friday as a member of the new administration's economic advisory team; Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, and Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy.