When President Obama brought Vivek Kundra on to become the first federal CIO, he chose his man because of Kundra’s affinity for agile development of technology and his philosophy of arming the citizenry with the power of Web 2.0 government mashups.

Last week, Kundra proved his salt in short order with the unveiling of a new federal IT spending dashboard that offers a prime example of how business intelligence and Web 2.0 can be united in a very meaningful way.

According to Kundra, who announced IT.USAspending.gov at the Personal Democracy Forum conference last week, the project will be evolved over phases, but the initial work to roll it out publicly took approximately six weeks.

 “On a real-time basis, we’re going to be providing American people the visibility into their tax dollars,” he says. “Part of this platform enables the easy utility of visualization tools to be able to drill down to where you can see percentages. So you can see how much money we’re spending on specific areas.”

As Kundra explained at his briefing at the conference and an additional Q&A Webcast, the dashboard gives the American people the ability to drill down into data by department and even by specific investments.

“There is data around prime contractors, and you can see specifically which prime contractor is working on a specific IT initiative,” Kundra says. “You can also see how the CIO is rating that initiative, how it is performing when it comes to cost schedule and whether it is actually meeting the performance objectives that were promised up front when funding was appropriated.”

The Office of Management and Budget worked with Kundra to bring the dashboard’s functionality live. The project is also requiring collaboration and participation from the CIOs of individual agencies, who are working steadily to improve data offered by the dashboard. A big factor in bringing the dashboard to fruition was a change in process that requires agencies to change their project reporting and grading procedures from an annual event to a monthly checkup.

The idea behind the intelligence offered by the dashboard was to organize and visualize information in an easy-to-understand format for normal citizens, while also aggregating data and offering feeds for technically savvy users to collaborate and create further applications that could tap into the raw data offered by the agencies.