What if you were asked to build a dashboard for your company that tracked IT spending? What would it look like, how would you test it, and how would you improve the product? Now, what if you had to build that dashboard not for your company, but for the whole federal government spending apparatus?

Recently, the newly named federal CIO Vivek Kundra launched the IT U.S. Spending Website, which seeks to track how the government is spending our tax dollars on IT. A New York Times article on the site notes that it was developed in about six weeks and seeks to get a handle on how $70 billion in IT dollars are being spent.

I took a quick run-through on the site, and I'd give it a B+ for a site built so quickly and taking on such a big task. I'd suggest more effort into not only tracking how those dollars are being spent, but also measuring the effectiveness of the projects being tracked. In a method similar to product ratings, you want to be able to give five stars to projects that are on time, on budget and do what they are intended to do.

The very coolest step would be for techies both in the U.S. and worldwide to have an opportunity to chime in and suggest easier and cheaper ways to spend those dollars.