Today, we found out that Vivek Kundra, a proven government IT innovator, would be in charge of the technology that runs the federal government.

It's hard for most people to realize why such a job is so important: The title "Chief Information Officer" sounds just as bureaucratic as Assistant Deputy Liaison to So-and-So, and if you've never worked on a federal computer network, you won't understand the full extent to which better systems would make for better government. I've written before about how far behind some agencies are, but yesterday morning, I found an example that will hopefully make things clear:

I woke up to an email from a friend about a job opening at my old home, the Defense Intelligence Agency. So I typed dia.mil into my browser and waited.

After a while, I realized that DIA's site wasn't configured correctly: only www.dia.mil works. (It takes about a minute for an administrator to fix this.)

I then clicked the "Vacancies and Employment" link, got a popup, and clicked the "Continue to Site" button.

...Nothing happened. I clicked a few more times, looked around for other windows that were perhaps loading in the background, and found nothing. The button was apparently miscoded, keeping the link from working correctly. So I took the URL from the button and typed it in manually: diajobs.dia.mil.

Success!

No, wait: Internet Explorer only. Failure.

Why am I giving you the play-by-play of my Web browsing? The ostensible purpose of the DIA jobs site is to recruit new talent, and I'm a big believer in getting talented people into government--especially technical talent. But this site effectively bars the very people they need the most: young, tech-savvy people just out of college who are familiar with online research.

If you have a Mac, you don't have IE, so you have no way to apply for a job at DIA. If you use Firefox on Windows, it's even more irritating: both the jobs site AND the earlier popup are IE-only, so even though the solution lies on your computer, you encounter the dead-end problem before it tells you the solution. You're stuck.

By the most conservative estimates, about 30% of us use Firefox or Safari. The number is much higher among college students, the very people this site is targeting. Some people will find a way around these barriers. Unfortunately, many such people would not want to work for a place with this kind of Web presence.

The government has had similar browser compliance issues in the past, most notably with FEMA's Katrina relief request site. And think: if the government's IT makes things so hard to the general public, imagine how many problems it's causing on the inside. Kundra has a tough job ahead of him, but in a way, I envy him: there's an enormous amount of low-hanging fruit, starting with simple matters of browser compliance and DNS records.