$70 billion in federal IT spending at a glance
President Obama’s CIO, Vivek Kundra, unveiled a new IT contracting dashboard yesterday at the Personal Democracy Forum conference in New York City.
Project managers and the public alike can now see an instant assessment of how well, or how poorly, $70 billion in federal IT investments are being managed.
The Federal IT Dashboard is an idea which found its inspiration in the CapStat program in Washington, D.C. When Kundra was the District of Columbia CTO, he set up a system of dashboards on flat panel displays mounted around an entire room dedicated to managing the city’s investments. Portfolio managers were tasked with monitoring projects, and acting when a dashboard indicated, for example, a cost overrun, or a missed deadline.
Strengthening the platform for the creation of a digital democracy, programmers can create custom data feeds on the Federal IT Dashboard to build applications which monitor particular projects.
Hats off to President Obama. Here’s a revolutionary technological innovation implemented just months after Obama was sworn in as President, proving the enormous value of having a technology advisor to create tools which increase the transparency and efficiency of the federal government.
[...] of dashboards was inspired by Kundra’s experience as CTO for the District of Columbia where portfolio managers are assigned projects to monitor for interventions if they start showing [...]