One of the best-known federal open government initiatives, the Federal IT Dashboard, is about to go open source, as one of the first projects released into the Civic Commons.
The IT Dashboard isn’t merely an open government tool in the sense of providing public access to information. It’s actually an IT governance tool: its primary users are government agencies that are responsible for monitoring IT spending, and the public visibility it provides into IT projects is an outgrowth of the visibility it gives those ultimately responsible for the projects. Since the IT Dashboard went live for the Federal government, other jurisdictions (both cities and states) have expressed interest in using it to improve their own cross-agency IT accountability.
It is a portfolio management tool, not a project management tool. It doesn’t include Gantt charts and day-by-day time allocation and the like. Rather, it’s a way for high-level responsible parties — and one can think of the public itself as the highest-level responsible party — to identify projects at risk, so that they can be fixed or, when appropriate, canceled or redirected. Vivek Kundra, the Federal CIO, uses the IT Dashboard to help determine which projects need closer examination, using TechStat and other review processes that involve both high-level data from the IT Dashboard and more detailed data from the projects themselves. Other jurisdictions have similar review processes in place already. Making the IT Dashboard available to them doesn’t necessarily change how they do review, but it helps shine a light on what projects need review.
The three main factors the IT Dashboard monitors are schedule performance, cost performance, and a human analysis factor. The last is essentially a rating from the people closest to the project, a way to encode their feel for how things are going. The human rating weighs more in the down case than the up case: if cost and schedule look good, but the specified requirements aren’t being met, then that fact should weigh more than if everything were going as hoped.
As with any tool, it must be accompanied by good processes. The IT Dashboard is only as useful as the information that goes into it. In its Federal deployment, the requirement is that updates happen every month — that is, the managers responsible for IT projects across the federal government input data about how their projects are doing, every month, to provide a clear indication of progress over time. It’s certainly possible to game the data, for a while: you can input roses and butterflies, but when the end of the project comes along, if it’s not performing as advertised, higher levels of management will ask why the monthly updates in the IT dashboard never indicated that there was a problem.
A tool that can crunch data from across a wide variety of agencies, and provide comprehensible high-level results accessible to the public, is exactly the sort of thing the Civic Commons was created to support. Recently, for example, the dashboard was improved by adding mechanisms for receiving data programmatically (such as via XML feeds), to make it able to take advantage of data generated by lower-level project management systems. Once it’s open sourced, an entire community of users has a chance expand that functionality to include automated data intake from the major project management tools in use across many jurisdictions — a win for everyone, including the Federal government and ultimately the public.
