Web site offers glimpse of how IT projects are performing

Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra on Tuesday unveiled a public Web site aimed at showing correlations between taxpayer dollars and the performance of federal information technology investments.

The IT dashboard was prompted in part by a pending transparency bill and represents an effort to address shortcomings in USASpending.gov, a site built in response to legislation co-sponsored by then-Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., calling for a Google-like searchable database of federal contracts. USASpending.gov has drawn criticism from taxpayer groups and lawmakers for being too cursory in the level of detail on subcontracts.

Most observers on Tuesday agreed the dashboard is clear and ably animates confusing numbers and budget documents. But early reaction on how the site might inject accountability into federal IT spending was mixed.

Some contractors welcomed the new insights, but said they were concerned that government officials and the public might draw hasty, inaccurate conclusions from the visuals.

The site should "provide greater vitality to the information" the Bush administration started to load online in 2008, said Alan Chvotkin, executive vice president and counsel of the Professional Services Council, a trade group for government contractors. "All of that is good, but my concern is that looking at the data without context could lead lawmakers, agency executives or the media to read a dashboard, see a schedule slip and think ... that the contractor has screwed up -- or the project is at risk -- when there may be legitimate reasons why those [anomalies] have taken place."

The current graphic presentations are based on traditional, year-ahead estimates for IT investments that agencies submit to the Office of Management and Budget. But the dashboard is expected to surpass mandates by updating the public monthly on new cost, schedule and performance figures that agencies report, according to OMB officials.

Chvotkin said the dashboard is simply an indicator. "Like a car dashboard, all it's telling you is to dig further, do some diagnostics and find more details," he said.

According to the site's analysis, major IT investments governmentwide totaled $38.6 billion for fiscal 2009, and there are significant concerns about schedule deviations for 18 percent of the expenditures. Nine percent of the investments have triggered significant cost concerns.

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, ranking member of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, commended the IT dashboard, but said the White House must do more to monitor technology spending.

"Federal agencies must pair this transparency with better upfront planning and concrete steps to end failing programs or get them back on track," she stated.

Collins and Sen. Thomas R. Carper, D-Del., in April reintroduced legislation from 2008 that would require officials to alert Congress if IT projects miss deadlines.

The new site also provides data feeds that third parties can subscribe to for updates in Extensible Markup Language (XML), a standard coding for exchanging information over the Internet. Users then can combine the IT data streams with outside information on job creation or health care spending, for example, to sell or offer innovative Web services.

The site is still in beta form and periodically throughout Tuesday morning users encountered error messages when trying to visit the site or particular Web pages.

Future releases are slated to include analyses of earned value management, or the value of work completed in a given period compared to the expected value and actual cost of that work. The site also is supposed to provide detailed links between investment data and awarded contracts, as well as the historical performance of major investments.

Interactive features will allow users to customize charts, download dynamic agency content to their own sites and track a personalized portfolio of investments. In his former job as the District of Columbia's chief technology officer, Kundra gained acclaim for establishing a "stock market model" to manage IT investments, where he treated programs and projects like public companies. He assigned portfolio managers to oversee all projects and demanded quarterly evaluations of cost, time and value.