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.