Vivek Kundra to leverage dashboards for open government
June 17th, 2009 by JD Kathuria
Vivek Kundra
When it comes to leveraging technology for greater government transparency, Federal CIO Vivek Kundra has something new in mind: dashboards. The New York Times Bits blog reports that by the end of the month, Kundra “hopes to start yet another federal Web site that will give officials and the public a window into all of the active government technology projects. For each project, it will show the purpose, schedule and budget. It will show the name and photo of the federal official responsible and the names of which contractors are working on the project … Most important, it will keep track of what Mr. Kundra believes are leading indicators that a project is going awry…”
The concept isn’t entirely new, at least for the private sector. As Thomas Wailgum over at CIO points out: “This is not a new concept for the private sector—GE was doing it back in 2000. But easy-to-understand dashboards and simple, yet powerful analytics are a great first step for monitoring government IT projects. In fact, keeping it simple is critical. Just ask the those enterprises and business users who are struggling to use their BI and analytic systems effectively today.” Other questions yet to be answered: Will Kundra get this dashboard built in-house, leverage open source software, or purchase the best commercial product.
What do you think? Is this a step forward for government transparency and efficiency? Share your comments here.
I do believe this is a step in the right direction. One of the key guidelines to wiki collaboration is Keep It Simple. If we can create a dashboard that is simple and to the point stating what he has outlined, that is more than enough to get the ball rolling.
Applications fail to be useful when too much is added.
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