TECHNOLOGY FOR CHANGE

Innovation and Accountability Drive Fed`s IT Dashboard

Ericka Chickowski | Date: 07-10-09 | Comments

The private sector can learn a lesson in developing BI applications from federal CIO Vivek Kundra.

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Innovation and Accountability Drive Fed`s IT Dashboard - Platform Lets American People Be Watchdogs, Innovators

�This new platform enables the American people to be the watchdogs, the auditors and innovators when it comes to how the United States government is spending billions of dollars in information technology,� he says. �The dream here is to have somebody�a grad student at three in the morning�looking at various data sets and at the intersection of those data sets they find value.�

Innovation and open government experts have already lauded the dashboard as a good sign of how the federal government can leverage Web 2.0 technology to drive transparency.

According to Kundra, this IT dashboard is a prototype that he hopes to scale across other types of federal spending categories if all goes right in the future.

�The IT.USAspending.gov [site] is a big step in the right direction. The key is to make data available in a form that is manageable and not simply a tsunami of numbers,� says Don Tapscott, chairman of nGenera Insight and a leading Web 2.0 author.

To some old-school business intelligence gurus entrenched in the enterprise, the abbreviated six-week timeframe for such an ambitious undertaking may seem like science fiction. But Kundra�s team managed to push the dashboard out by maintaining a perfect-as-you-go mentality in keeping with some of the facets of agile development that have captured the minds of the more innovative thinkers within business intelligence of late. For example, at the moment data fed into the dashboard is incomplete as all agencies catch up to new demands for reporting.

�Is it perfect right now? Absolutely not. Is it going to get better? Absolutely,� Kundra says. �As more and more people look at the Website, we�re going to see the data improve significantly.

This approach to developing visualization and BI tools can prove to be a valuable lesson to those in the private sector. Here is the federal government, notorious for ice-age slow bureaucratic processes, tapping into large data stores with lightning speed.

Unlike Kundra, many within the BI community find it hard to adjust quickly and to lose the veil of perfectionism that keeps projects tangled in development and testing long after users ask for the ability to tap into specific sets of data. According to Ken Collier, a consultant for the Cutter Consortium who specializes in agile development within BI, developers need to rethink their attitudes.

�One of the things that I ask a lot of people is what it means to really be finished,� Collier says. �Because, in my experience, most systems are never finished until they're just ready to be buried. And, really, any software project worth its salt is constantly undergoing new phases of user development or enhancement.�

When Collier helps organizations bring agile philosophies to their BI development, he encourages two-week cycles within which developers can incrementally add functionality according to user feedback.

�I say, let�s get started, let�s put something out there, let�s get feedback about whether it�s good or not, and then let�s adapt to that feedback,� he says. �Then just continue the cycle. You know, wash, rinse and repeat.�

The main objection he gets from traditionalists is that they don�t want to go live with an application that turns users off, as they fear they�ll lose support early and never regain it. Collier says hogwash: �I think that by and large the BI user and customer community would really prefer to be shown something early.�