Susan P Crawford, Columnist

The U.S. Needs a Tech-Smart Government

October 24, 2013 at 2:45 PM UTC

Susan Crawford, the John A. Reilly visiting professor in intellectual property at Harvard Law School, is the author of "Captive Audience." Her book "The Responsive City," with co-author Stephen Goldsmith, will be published in September. In 2009, Susan Crawford served as special assistant to President Barack Obama for science, technology, and innovation policy. She is a former law partner at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering (now WilmerHale). She is the founder of OneWeb Day, a global Earth Day for the Internet held each Sept. 22. She earned a bachelor’s degree, summa cum laude, and a law degree from Yale University.

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Modern software developers move quickly. They push out the door what they call “minimum viable products,” revising as needed, based on their users’ experiences. They often use “open source” software -- code that’s more stable because it’s free and therefore tested more widely by more users.

The company executives who employ these software makers are themselves knowledgeable about technology, and they track the progress of their own products and others’ as well. They deploy elaborate quality-assurance testing and strong project management to make sure new software never cripples their businesses. When’s the last time you saw LinkedIn stop working when it rolled out a new product?