Radical Transparency: The New Federal IT Dashboard

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 21

Today, at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York, Vivek Kundra, the US national CIO, unveiled the new IT spending dashboards at usaspending.gov. The dashboards are designed to help Vivek and the CIOs of individual government agencies get a handle on the effectiveness of government IT spending.

At the top level, the dashboards provide a view of spending by major government department, with graphs showing performance against schedule, costs, and the CIO's assessment of how well they are meeting their objectives. For example, here's a stark view of IT performance at the Veteran's Administration (click to expand image):

49% of the VA's IT projects are behind schedule, and Roger Baker, the agency CIO, deems that a full 63% of the projects are in need of serious attention. (Here's a recent article that outlines Baker's tough-love plans for IT at the Veteran's Administration.)

As you drill down, you get to dashboards for individual IT projects (800 projects and approximately $20 billion in budgeted spending). Each project shows the responsible government official, the prime contractors on the project, the CIO's evaluation of its progress against goals, and each month, an update showing an update of that progress. (We'll show one of these later in this article.)

The dashboards are an incredibly ambitious undertaking. In the first place, there has never been a government-wide view like this of all IT spending, and the progress of projects. What's even more remarkable, though, is that the dashboards are being shared with the public. It's a bit like having your performance review posted on the company bulletin board for all to see.

In notes provided to press in advance of the announcement, Vivek Kundra wrote (italics mine):

Over the past several years, we have witnessed numerous public failures of major information technology systems and just last year saw roughly one third of all investments reported as poorly planned or poorly performing. Many of these investments may never deliver on their original promises. With over $75 Billion in annual federal information technology spending, we need a new foundation for management - one built on the values of transparency, accountability, and responsibility....

Data is powerful. It enables monitoring, reporting, and meaningful analysis that leads to better decisions. Yet, in the case of federal information technology, we lack insight into project performance. Poor data quality coupled with infrequent reporting has led to lack of meaningful analysis and bad decisions. Numerous failures and cost overruns may have been avoided with timely access to accurate information.

The Administration is committed to using technology to move past these barriers. In the IT Dashboard, the public has a platform for unprecedented access to useful, unfiltered data regarding the performance of IT investments. Information available includes responsible government officials and contractors as well as project performance data, updated monthly. This enables better decision-making, giving us the ability to turn around poorly performing projects and to divest from those which no longer make sense.

In making this data publicly available, we are providing unfettered access to investment performance to its true owners - the American people.

Vivek explained that last point further in a telephone conversation with me last night. I asked him about the level of buy-in across the government for this kind of radical transparency about the performance of projects. He said:

"It's a cultural transformation, in terms of recognizing that we are in the public square. The work that we do is work that is supposed to be performed in the interest of the American taxpayers. And so making visible how we're performing means fleshing out these complicated issues in the public square. Culturally, making the shift is much better than letting it hide under the veil of secrecy.

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