A journey towards greater IT Transparency and Accountability
Yesterday, the newly appointed Federal CIO for USA, Vivek Kundra, launched the new IT spending dashboard as a beta release. The dashboards are designed to help him and his team of individual CIOs of government agencies manage the $70billion of IT spend.
Navigating through the dashboard, you can view a high-level spending by a select group of agencies with charts measuring the performance based on schedule, cost and each CIO’s evaluation against each project objectives.
The dashboard allows you to drill down to each project, showing key agency (Agency Head, Agency CIO), project information (project phase, Prime Contractor, YTD Actual spend, Project Completion Date)…etc
If you are involved in IT project management activities, you should be able to visualize what I am talking about by now, without jumping off this page to visit the dashboard site (I am not showing an image here intentionally because I think it is important that you visit the site itself to see for yourself).
The simplicity of the dashboard (in case you are interested, built using Drupal, an open source content management platform) is not in the technology, but the resolve to improve the returns of IT investments by making transparent all these information to the public (not just US government employees, not just US citizens, but everyone in the world, that has access to Internet). Citizens (and anyone in the world who is interested) can parse the data, mashup it with other data sources.
“Everyone knows there have been spectacular failures when it comes to technology investments,” Kundra said. “Now for the first time the entire country can see how we’re spending money and give us input.”
Scrolling through some of the agencies’ project, you will noticed that some data are missing (e.g. CIO’s evaluation) – a hint of not 100% adoption of the dashboard by the agency. Still, incomplete visibility is better than no visibility. The data can only get better because unlike typical IT application projects where you usually will find some reluctant users that you cannot do much with. In this case, the citizens (the true owners of the investment projects) get to see which agency is not doing their homework. This approach seems to be consistent with President Obama’s style of using his social network of public supporters not just for campaigning, but to govern.
One technology observation mentioned on the FAQ section of the site – monthly updates to the dashboard is made through a web interface as part of the dashboard feature and there are plans in future to explore using XML feeds for data submission. This is laying good foundation using standardized artchitecture integration to allow citizen integration – imagine private web developers using open APIs or receiving these dashboard data feeds in RSS, to present the data in another format or manner that may expose opportunities for improvements.
Despite that this initiative is confined to US government IT data, I am excited because it set a model example on governance for private sectors as well as for other countries’ e-government strategies.
In Kundra’s case, he built a platform (IT dashboard) for all the agency CIOs to use and open up this data to the public.
Is there an opportunity for your IT organization to lead the business by building a similar platform where every department/region can use and the data (non-financially sensitive) are opened up to all employees?
