The Nation's CIO: Government Needs a Dashboard

Vivek Kundra, the nation's new chief information officer, will manage $76 billion in spending to maintain 10,000 government systems as well as 800 active projects to build major new systems (those costing $50 million or more). And dashboards are a critical tool. By the end of June, CIO Kundra hopes to start yet another federal Web site that will give officials and the public a window into all of the active government technology projects. For each project, it will show the purpose, schedule and budget. It will show the name and photo of the federal official responsible and the names of which contractors are working on the project, a fact that CIO Kundra says oddly has not been made public before. Most important, it will keep track of what Kundra believes are leading indicators that a project is going awry.