Feds Debut IT Dashboard

The Office of Management and Budget rolled out its latest transparency tool June 30 with the debut of an IT Dashboard. A part of USASpending.gov, the dashboard allows users to track federal IT initiatives through a Web browser.

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Deploying charts and graphs, the dashboard displays federal IT spending information by agency and department. Users can compile their own data sets and export them as spreadsheets. Users can also use the customized data sets on their own Websites, blogs or social networking sites such as Facebook or Twitter.

The dashboard displays data from 28 federal agencies, information on more than 7,000 federal IT investments and detailed numbers from more than 780 large projects.

"Specifically, you can see which IT projects are working and on schedule (and which are not), offer alternative approaches, and provide direct feedback to the chief information officers at federal agencies," Director Peter Orszag wrote on the OMB blog. "In effect, it allows you to keep tabs on the people who are responsible for spending taxpayers' dollars for technology. And with approximately $72 billion budgeted for federal IT spending this year, it's important that these funds are spent wisely."

The new dashboard is part of a broader effort by the White House to bring better transparency to the federal government. The effort is led by Federal CIO Vivek Kundra, who will work with Chief Performance Officer Jeffrey Zients to add more tools and expand the data beyond IT spending.