Now that the world has escaped a total financial meltdown, thanks to Bernanke, Obama, the leaders of China, and a huge dose of luck, it's time to start avoiding the next looming financial disaster: The impact of huge US federal deficits on the world economy and on America's ability to solve problems at home and around the world. Even though the economy is still fragile and the jobs recovery has not begun yet, there's no time to waste.

I was encouraged to hear Senators Kent Conrad and Judd Gregg talk up their proposal for a deficit task force on NPR yesterday (http://tinyurl.com/ylmtd88) they're calling for an 18-member task committee made of up eight Democrats, eight Republicans, and two people from the Obama Administration. The committee would propose ways of lowering the national deficit, which would then go to the House and Senate for a vote.

The thought that the US Congress might get beyond partisanship to take on this huge challenge is the first encouraging sign about the health of our democracy since Obama's election. Even better, they might actually get something done. Reforming Congress itself by getting rid of appropriations bill earmarks would be a good start. But there's plenty of progress to be made in the way the government bureaucracy is organized and operates.

The Obama administration already has some really smart people working on making government more efficient and effective. I met Jeff Zients, the country's chief performance officer, along with CIO Vivek Kundra and CTO Aneesh Chopra, when I wrote a piece about their efforts for BusinessWeek back in November. (http://tinyurl.com/yzunbhu) Jeff told me: “At 30,000 feet, the goal is to make government more effective and efficient by making it faster, smarter, and cheaper.”

Part of the solution is better technology. That's why Kundra and Chopra are working so closely with Zients. And there's a lot more that can be done. I was encouraged this morning to read a speech (http://tinyurl.com/yesnej3)

delivered yesterday by my new boss, IBM's Sam Palmisano, at London's Chatham House. Sam talked about what IBM has learned since it one year ago launched its Smarter Planet strategy for applying technology and thought to make the world work better. One of the takeaways is that governments and companies working together on complex problems can make things function better and more efficiently in fairly short order. One example: in four cities where IBM has helped deploy congestion management systems, traffic volume during peak periods has been reduced by up to 18 percent and CO2 emissions from vehicles were cut by up to 14 percent.

It's abundantly clear that governments need to operate much more efficiently. They're being asked to do more with less. And it's also becoming clear that technology has the potential to play a vital role. In his Chatham House speech, Sam said: “Applying smarter technologies to drive cost out of our legacy systems and institutions—doing more with less—will be critical to our near-term and long-term economic prospects.” The word “critical” is no exaggeration. Hopefully, some cool heads will prevail in the US Congress, and they'll get on with the serious business of solving the nation's looming deficit problems—with technology as an important tool.

One other thought: So much of the attention of the media today is on the latest cell phone or tablet, or the latest consumer social networking Web site. Cool, yes, and these are powerful tools for communications and social change. But the hottest features of the latest gadgets are piffles compared to the uses that technology can be put to to help solve the world's problems. I wish this powerful industry would focus more on that.