IT dashboard halts 45 wasteful Veteran’s Affairs projects
The Department of Veteran’s affairs halted 45 IT projects totaling $200 million in fiscal year 2009 alone, the nation’s Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra announced on his blog today.
Kundra wrote that one of the projects was 110% over budget and 17 months behind schedule.
The VA will audit the projects in the coming weeks to determine if they should be salvaged or scrapped altogether.
The wasteful projects were discovered thanks to the IT spending dashboard which Kundra unveiled just a couple of weeks ago.
The dashboard tracks provides business intelligence tools to decision makers and the public to understand at a glance which IT investments are reaching their milestones, and which require scrutiny.
The use 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 problems.
[...] Given the size and importance of IT investments at the federal level, the potential savings from improving project oversight is enormous. One example is that Kundra sent a memo to the Environmental Protection Agency’s CIO explaining what he expects to see done to get a project on course again that is now $30 million over its budget and a year behind schedule. If improvements aren’t seen, Kundra could halt projects, as was done earlier last year with a Veterans’ Administration IT project. [...]