Written by Tod Tompkins
Last week, Federal CIO Steven VanRoekel announced that the IT Dashboard had been updated to include “detailed IT investment information in support of the President’s FY 2013 Budget.” Mr. VanRoekel posted highlights of the new and improved IT Dashboard on the OMBlog. In case you have been hiding under a rock for the past few years, the IT Dashboard was established in 2009 to support President Obama’s open government initiative. Its goal is to provide agencies “the tools needed to reduce duplication in IT spending, strengthen the accountability of agency CIOs, and provide more accurate and detailed information on projects and activities.” Basically, the one-stop-shop for all of your IT project needs.
According to the blog post, the updated version of the IT Dashboard will offer increased transparency to all of these IT investments, as well as better assist CIOs in their ability to “intervene in troubled projects sooner.” The Dashboard makeover includes:
- Greater accessibility – “…access to individual projects and activities associated with an investment, links investments to funding sources, and includes enhanced visualizations to better track investment performance year-to-year”
- Duplication identification – “New data on what kind of services each investment provides helps agencies identify and address duplication in their IT portfolios”
- Data quality improvement – “Improved validations and warnings prevent erroneous data from coming into the system, and new data quality reports help agencies to identify improvements they can make to their existing data”
- Additional data/tools – “More datasets are now available, and additional tools are in place that enable the public to participate by downloading and building their own applications”
Question is, who is using the IT Dashboard and how is it being used? Is it primarily an inter-governmental tool or are citizens actively engaging? According to Mr. VanRoekel, the use of the IT Dashboard and TechStat sessions (another Administration accountability mechanism) has resulted in taxpayer savings approaching $4 billion…so somebody is using it.
Let us know if/how you access and use the IT Dashboard. Post your responses below in the “comment” section or connect with us at Facebook or Twitter.
