IT Dashboard Provides Detailed Look at Tech Spending

On Tuesday, June 30, Vivek Kundra, the new federal Chief Information Officer, unveiled the IT dashboard, part of the newly redesigned USAspending.gov. The dashboard is actually pretty amazing, as it lets users examine every federal IT project, by agency, and shows whether each project is on schedule and on budget, along with a link to a detailed list of performance metrics for the project. It also has a tab for analysis of the data, which right now is limited to a graph of spending by agency over time and a chart showing a breakdown of the current year's budget. The site also allows third-parties to download XML versions of the data, a feature which I hope will now be standard on all government sites.

The dashboard, which is modeled on a similar project Kundra implemented during his tenure as CIO of Washington, DC, is a gigantic step forward in the administration's movement towards being more transparent and accountable. Indeed, the only real limitation of the dashboard (other than its somewhat confusing layout) is that it only applies to IT projects. Kundra is reportedly working with the newly-confirmed Chief Performance Officer, Jeff Zients, on expanding the idea to include other federal projects, which is something we here at OMB Watch are eagerly looking forward to.

There are plenty of articles about the IT dashboard for you to choose from on this, so take your pick. My favorite is the ZDNet article, but they're all good.

Federal Computing Week

New York Observer

And, of course, the official OMBlog.

Image by Flickr user sarosenamy. Used under a Creative Commons license.

(Sam Rosen-Amy 07/02/09)

Comments

by Anonymous (not verified) on 12/07/09

I support transparency, but

I support transparency, but the process to update the site needs to be streamlined. OMB requires the use of the "official" Exhibit 300, which means reporting against milestones that may have changed with the start of the new fiscal year under which performance is being tracked, such as contract changes. The Exhibit 300 for the fiscal year isn't official until the President has submitted his budget, which means several months of potentially incorrect budget and performance information. It would be better to use the REAL cost and schedule that efforts are performing against. If these change when the budget becomes official, then update the information to again correspond to reality. The problem is OMB lives in its budget analyst world view, but projects do not.