Transparency and IT: The Federal IT Dashboard

If you run an IT organization and have not had a chance to look at the new Federal IT dashboard, take sometime today and look at it. The transparency that our new Federal CIO, Vivek Kundra, built is great! We, the American People, the investors if you will, are now able to see the performance of our investments in the US government. I have always touted transparency for IT and now project by project, each CIO within the government is required to report progress on all of their projects to the public.

Amazingly, Vivek only gave the CIOs 30 days to get their information up to date and even more importantly, since the IT dashboard obtains its information from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the agency CIOs have to not only update the information but update it through the proper channels for it to be placed into the dashboard.

With one simple portal, Vivek has increased the use of the standardized project management frameworks in place throughout the government, increased the accuracy of information, and has helped create a sense of urgency and fiduciary responsibility for each agency CIO because their performance is now open for all to see. Similar to posting your review for all to see on the company bulletin board, we have advocated that public access to information increases the chance that an employee will “do the right thing” For example, we recommend that when you are starting to deploy change management processes internally that any person that bypasses the change management controls and introduces an outage have their picture posted on a company wiki, sharepoint portal, etc as the “wild wild west cowboy” that “caused the problems”.

A little bit of public humiliation may be just what we need to get the governments IT projects back on track! Some examples:

• 49% of the VA’s IT projects are behind schedule
• 41% of Department of Homeland Security projects have “significant concerns”
• The Smithsonian Institution receives $60M and the majority of that investment goes to IT Infrastructure Maintenance
• The DoE has had an almost 50% decrease in IT spending since 2002

Oh, and in case you were wondering…many(over 30%) of the governments IT projects are behind or in need for serious help.

Check out Tim O’Reilly’s blog post about the Federal IT dashboard for more information on how it was constructed and how it receives data.

Tagged as: CIOs, dashboard, fiduciary responsibility, IT, management frameworks, office of management and budget, project management, Tim O'Reilly, transparency