The Office of Personnel Management stores millions of federal employees' paper personnel files at a massive facility in Pennsylvania, just one example of how the federal government has failed to digitize records and effectively use technology, Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra said.

Federal employees may carry iPhones and have Facebook accounts, but Chopra said the government must do more to catch up with how other countries' governments already use technology.

"You and I have embraced technology. It's unfortunate that our public policy hasn't caught up," Chopra said Tuesday in a speech at The Atlantic's State of the Union for Technology in Washington.

The government has been slow to embrace technology because agencies have be overwhelmed by the prospect of getting IT programs and Web sites perfect, Chopra said. The Obama administration is changing that precedent with its Open Government Directive, issued in December, which requires agencies to launch and update public Web sites quickly, he said.

If programmers and managers try to hold back releasing data and Web sites until they are 100 percent correct, citizens will never have access to data they want and deserve, Chopra said. Erroneous data can be corrected later, he said.

"We do not presume that when we launch, we are perfect. We are saying launch when we are good enough," Chopra said.

President Obama's Open Government Directive required each agency to post at least three high-value data sets online within 45 days after the directive was issued. Kundra hopes bloggers and journalists will analyze the data to provide useful information to consumers. He said he hopes people will use and share data in the ways they find most helpful.

"Have it your way — that's the administration's philosophy," he said.