It’s not every entrepreneur who even entertains the notion of moving from business to government. Bryan Sivak, though, has made the shift three times over. Sivak left his job at the company he helped create for a position in city government (as Chief Technology Officer for Washington, DC), then became Maryland’s Chief Innovation Officer, and is now doing federal time, so to speak, as CTO of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Sivak is the successor to Todd Park, the Boston-area entrepreneur who co-founded Athenahealth before joining HHS—and who is now serving as CTO of the United States and pushing “data jujitsu.” Park personally recruited Sivak to take his old job, in a pitch over coffee that began with “Actually, dude, hold on.” (More on this below.)
Sivak, who co-founded an enterprise software company—InQuira, acquired last year by Oracle—will be a keynote speaker at Xconomy’s upcoming Healthcare in Transition event the afternoon of December 10 here in Cambridge, MA. I caught up with him recently on the phone to ask him about his path to federal government—and what he is trying to do to help Uncle Sam, and HHS, become more innovative, a subject he will definitely take up on December 10.
On how—and why—he took his present job at HHS
“I had promised myself my job in Maryland would be my last government job for a while–and that I would never go to the federal government because I was scared of the bureaucracy,” says Sivak.
The plan was to stay in the Maryland role until Gov. Martin O’Malley finished his term at the end of 2014. But earlier this year, Aneesh Chopra, the first CTO of the U.S., announced he was leaving and Park was picked to take over. Park and Sivak knew each other, and not long after Park took his new role, Sivak asked him to coffee, in hopes Maryland might be able to work with the feds around data sharing. But Park soon had a different type of sharing in mind. Recalls Sivak, “About halfway through the conversation, he just said, ‘Actually dude, hang on. I really want you to do my old job.’”
So what made him sign on after that promise to himself? “The scope of the problem, the complexity of the issues, and the potential for even small changes to have massive effects,” says Sivak. He started in July.
On his general approach to helping government be more innovative
“Bureaucracy in a lot of ways is a state of mind,” says Sivak. “There’s a lot of stuff that’s sort of enforced by custom rather than reason—and those things are ripe for challenging. We can really improve processes by asking why a lot. If the answer is because it is enshrined in law, ok fine, that’ll take longer to solve. But if it’s just because we’ve always done it that way, to me that’s a terrible answer.”
On his job at HHS
“There are a lot of people out there both inside the department and in the outside world who are passionate believers in their work. The first part of our job is to find those people. The second piece is to put them together, to connect them. We believe people are stronger when they’re working together, and frankly you’re going to need partners to make a change in this world. So we want to act as a matchmaker in a lot of ways.
“The third element really is environmental. We want to provide an environment—the tools, the resources, the processes—for people to succeed.” (Some specifics of this below.)
Some First Steps: Think Crowdfunding for Government Innovation
Sivak pointed to several ideas he is working on to try to spur more innovative approaches to healthcare—and how the government can help.
One is a program Sivak’s group is working on is to put
