Vivek Kundra unveils US federal IT dashboard
Recently we reported that Federal CIO Vivek Kundra planned on leveraging dashboards to further government transparency and accountability. In particular, Kundra envisioned a dashboard as a way to gauge the productivity of the US government’s $74 billion investment in federal technology projects. That vision has now become reality. Just yesterday, Kundra unveiled the US Federal IT Dashboard at the Personal Democracy Forum 2009 in New York City.
“This administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in government and the IT Dashboard exemplifies that goal,” said Kundra in a statement. “Through the dashboard, we are putting critical information about IT spending at people’s fingertips. We are putting ourselves on the line for better management of taxpayers’ dollars and better results from technology initiatives.”
The most critical part of the IT Dashboard is its Investments page. There you’ll find reports on the overall performance of every major investment in the government’s IT portfolio. Performance is measured in terms of cost performance, schedule performance, and evaluation by agency CIO, with the overall score computed from those factors. For more details on the dashboard and how to navigate it, check out this 8-minute tutorial:
What do you think of the IT dashboard? Share your comments here.
Posted by Staff Writer
on Wednesday, July 1st, 2009. Filed under News.
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Although I applaud Vivek Kundra’s intent, as usual the implementation is a complete mess typical of government work — unusable for any real oversight purpose. Maybe things will improve — they certainly need to.
I downloaded the 2 available files — helpfully named Exhibit53 and Exhibit300. The fields advertised as being available had promising names like:
Total IT Spending FY2008 (Actuals)
Total IT Spending FY2009 (Budget)
Total IT spending FY2010 (Enaacted)
etc
Looks great, right? Unfortunately, the CSV files (!?) that actually got downloaded had the payload column names like the ones listed below — no units specified, no explanation of what the weird codes are, yada yada yada.
As the dashboard currently stands the claims of increased transparency and public accessibility are still completely empty.
Actual payload column titles in downloaded CSV files:
total Investments PY
total Investments CY
total Investments BY
DMEPY
DMECY
DMEBY
Steady State PY
Steady State CY
Steady State BY