July 3, 2009

White House unveils new Web site detailing IT project performance

Posted by Arjun Thomas

The White House unveiled a new database Tuesday that shows how well — or how poorly — $72 billion worth of information technology projects are being managed. Vivek Kundra, the federal chief information officer, unveiled the database, saying that “billions of dollars have been spent on IT initiatives yet some of them have not yielded the dividends promised upfront.” “That has been the impetus for rolling out this dashboard which is to make sure we have the ability to make available the data in terms of how we manage IT projects across the board to the public,” he added. The IT Dashboard, as it is named, can be found on the government’s USASpending.gov Web site, which tracks contract and grant spending. The IT Dashboard tracks more than 7,000 IT projects, informing the public on how well they are meeting requirements, keeping on schedule, and staying within budget.

The dashboard consolidates information the Bush administration reported as part of its quarterly IT Management Watch List and High Risk List. The lists were scrapped in favor of the dashboard because the lists “didn’t really give a lot of visibility into what was going on and what was the root cause of some of these problems,” Kundra said.

“Secondly, the administration would not be able to benefit from the ingenuity of the American people by asking them, is there a third way or a better way than how we’re approaching some of these technology issues,” he added.

The dashboard allows for both. Visitors to the Web site can obtain granular information on any project, such as the money budgeted and spent on each project milestone. They can also provide feedback to the project’s chief information officer through an online e-mail form, export data to personal computers or Web sites, and share data with friends via social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, Kundra said.

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