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The US government's IT dashboard

Posted by Kenny MacIver | 5 Oct 2009

Vivek Kundra, the US government's first ever CIO, was appointed by Barack Obama in March 2009

Vivek Kundra, the US government's first ever CIO, was appointed by Barack Obama in March 2009

"We want to democratise data, put it in the public square. The default setting for [IT project data] should be that its open, so people can slice and dice it."

So said Vivek Kundra, CIO to the US government, in a recent speech.

But dare you go there? Over the summer of 2009, Kundra - appointed by Barack Obama as the first-ever CIO to the US government back in March - rolled out an online dashboard that candidly exposes the current spending and schedule metrics of the 800 major projects that make up the bulk of the federal governments $76 billion annual IT spend.

The IT Dashboard uses interactive graphs and classic red/amber/green signals to provide a drill-down into project performance, identifying the agencies, departments and the CIOs responsible for each projects ongoing success or failure. At least one agency - the Department of Veterans Affairs - has already been goaded into action, announcing it has halted 45 wayward projects, budgeted at $200 million.

The question now is whether IT executives elsewhere have the nerve to mimic that level of transparency.

For more on this, see our feature on de-risking IT.

To find out why Kundra's UK counterpart, John Suffolk, maintains a blog, see our "Should CIOs blog publicly?" debate. See also our list of CIOs who maintain a regular blog.



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