Innovation and Accountability Drive Fed`s IT Dashboard
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.
“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.
A user comment on this articlePosted on: 07-17-09 | By: AnonymousI am a BI consultant and have seen what you mentioned countless number of times. It was refreshing to read your comment. You nicely summed up how I feel.
It seems at times Sr. IT Mgmt (at many companies) just wants to look good by creating work products that look good and do not focus on the value to their business.
In the end, there may not be much return on investment, but they are not held accountable.
A user comment on this articlePosted on: 07-10-09 | By: AnonymousIt's pretty sad that people still equate great BI dashboards with eye candy. This isn't rocket science, the data is the important thing, not the graphics (although the graphics can be useful if used appropriately).
Not much interaction with the data besides some filters. Seems that the current theme in BI tools is to put more lipstick on the pig that comprises the underlying data. If the data is bad, it's still an ugly pig, IMHO.
Perhaps more of a statement on senior management in corporate America today. Since they don't understand the data, a pretty picture is at least good to look at in their confusion.
It's a step in the right direction, but really far from being useful.
Looks pretty though.
A user comment on this articlePosted on: 07-10-09 | By: AnonymousI have to see this being used by bloggers or even the MSM. I can't wait to see people use this data to question the utter stupidity of much of the government's spending.
