OMB upgrades tracking tool for IT projects

The Office of Management and Budget has added more features to an application for viewing data about agency information technology projects that are at risk because of size or management issues, OMB said today.

The application, Visualization for Understanding Expenditures in Information Technology (Vue-IT) is designed to increase transparency of agency IT investments by letting users track agency data about IT investments and their status on the agency's  Management Watch List and the High Risk List, OMB said.

“OMB is committed to continually improving the transparency, quality, timeliness, and validity of the data and information we use as a tool in managing our federal IT portfolio,” said Karen Evans, OMB's administrator for e-government and IT.

Vue-IT organizes the IT projects by agency, bureau and Federal Enterprise Architecture service grouping, she said. The data is already public, but OMB has made it more accessible and useful, Evans has said.

Among the added features for following IT investment data are:

• Determining whether the High Risk projects have a baseline with clear goals.
  
• The ability to export data displayed on pages in standard formats.
• User feedback to OMB through e-mail messages and a wiki community.