Dashboard Data for Government IT Projects
Posted by Brad EgelandSince we’ve done a decent amount of discussion here on project status, project budgets, on schedule, behind schedule, and project dashboards in general, it was refreshing to read the federal government’s CIO, Vivek Kundra’s idea of making IT project data available for everyone to view. And he wants it completely unfiltered. He’s correct in stating that data gets too much massaging…that happens too much in the private sector – imagine how much it can happen in the public sector.
The following info comes from J. Nicholas Hoover’s article for InformationWeek and I find it a breath of fresh air for those of us who have been managing projects a long time and priding ourselves in presenting meaningful, realistic data even when it hurts. And I have worked a great deal in the public sector on large government projects – much bad news can get hidden if you choose to go that route. It’s nice to see them wanting to take the high road with the tax payers’ dollars.
Federal CIO Wants Unfiltered Data on IT Projects
Federal CIO Vivek Kundra is looking to improve the data that’s available on the effectiveness of government IT projects by tapping directly into systems that collect data on those projects.
Speaking during a town hall yesterday at the Open Government and Innovations Conference, Kundra said there are “too many people in between” the government’s recently launched IT Dashboard and the original sources of data made available there. The IT Dashboard is a Web site that discloses information about government IT projects, including whether those projects are on schedule and on budget. “Data gets massaged too many times,” Kundra said.
As part of the IT Dashboard, projects that are significantly over budget or behind schedule get highlighted in red in charts that show agency IT spending. Kundra acknowledged concerns among government IT professionals and CIOs that employees would be scrutinized and their job effectiveness judged on whether projects were in the red.
“It’s okay if a project is behind schedule as long as we understand what’s causing the delay,” he said. “Just because something’s red is not cause for panic.”
Kundra acknowledged that the IT Dashboard doesn’t do enough to recognize the successful outcomes of IT projects and said his office is working add that capability to the IT Dashboard. The challenge is to insure that performance and expenditure data are integrated in the process, he added.
Kundra said his office is looking at a number of federal regulations and policies, including the federal policy on cookies and the Paperwork Reduction Act, to assess whether they continue to make sense in today’s technology environment.
His team is also looking at FedBizOpps, the government site that lists procurement opportunities for private industry, to see if technology like RSS feeds can be added to make it more usable.
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One Comment to “Dashboard Data for Government IT Projects”
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Gregor Petri says:
Transparency is vital for good project management (and democracy) and Vivek Kundra’s push for the original sources of data to be made available is understandable. However, more data does not necessarily always mean more understanding or clarity. It often is the context (what are we trying to achieve, and how successful are we in achieving that) that transforms data into information.
Maybe a thought might be to go back to the original intent of the Clinger-Cohen, introduced over a decade ago. Passed by US Congress in 1996 it gave the OMB a big role in improving the acquisition and use of IT within the federal government. But instead of applying static metrics of dogma, it proposed a continuous improvement approach mandating a portfolio approach as the standard process for analyzing, tracking and evaluating the risks and results of all IT investments. A practice now also being picked up also in Europe.
I blogged about this some time ago at http://leanitmanager.blogspot.com/2008/02/lessons-from-decade-of-clinger-cohen.html