New Government Site Details IT Spending
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By Stefanie Hoffman, ChannelWeb
8:47 PM EDT Tue. Jun. 30, 2009
The U.S. Chief Information Officer is launching a new Web site intended to monitor and assess more than $70 billion allocated for government information technology projects, The Washington Post reported.
The new Web site, called IT Dashboard, was unveiled by U.S CIO Vivek Kundra early Tuesday at the Personal Democracy Forum conference, held in Manhattan.
Located at USAspending.gov, the IT Dashboard Web site represents a concerted effort by President Barack Obama's administration to make information about the government's spending and projects transparent and accessible to the public, pledged while Obama was blazing the campaign trail.
Altogether, the site, which pulls information from numerous agencies and the Office of Management and Budget, aims to provide detailed information on specific IT projects and where government funds are allocated, while providing users the ability to track the project over time. Agencies are expected to update cost, performance figures, agency CIO ratings and other collected investment information on a monthly basis.
The data aggregated on the site covers a broad spectrum of federal agencies, from the Department of Agriculture to the Social Security Administration.
True to its name, the site provides a "performance dashboard" for all agencies, offering digestible pie charts and line graphs providing information that breaks status of projects down to ones that are considered "normal" or on track; ones that "need attention," or ones that have "significant concerns." That data is then broken down by whether the troubles are finance-related, off schedule, or simply have not yet been evaluated. The site also breaks down detailed information on government IT investments by contracts, grants, loans, insurance and direct payments and also shows which contracts were won competitively or in a no-bid contest.
Initially, the IT Dashboard site is being launched in beta so developers can work out the bugs. However, citizens and Web developers can still parse the site's data or use it in combination with other data sets for their own Web feeds.
"I talked to the CIO Council and saw the data change overnight," Kundra said, according to the Post. "It was cleaned up immediately when people realized it was going to be made public."
Last month, Kundra launched data.gov, which consolidated public data feeds that are public but obscure. Data.gov was launched with 47 data sets, but has since grown to more than 100,000, according to the Post.