The article that I chose for this week is about a project that the US government new C.I.O. Vivek Kundra has proposed in order to keep track of federal technology projects. According to Mr. Kundra there is a lot of money wasted every year on federal government technology projects that get abandoned for one reason or another. In his opinion, the Federal Government has been wasting time and resources trying to come up with a custom designed system for every problem instead of using what's already available commercially.
Mr. Kundra is now in charge of managing $76 billion that is spent yearly to maintain 10,000 government systems as well as 800 active projects to build new systems. His answer to managing all these projects and systems and avoiding failures lies in the use of dashboards. He is planning to start another federal web-site that will allow officials as well as public accessing information about all of the government technology projects, their purpose, schedule and budget. It will also show the name of the official responsible for the project, and it will also keep track of any changes that are done which sometimes may be a sign that the project may fail if the number of changes is significant, more than 10, according to Mr. Kundra. The dashboards will also be able to show if "the start date of the project was retroactively moved forward to make it look less late." Based on a number of key indicators, every project will be rated from 0 to 10. The data from these dashboards will be available for people who want to build their own applications for analizing federal technology projects. Applications will also be available for posting on social networks.
Mr. Kundra believes that these dashboards will be particularly useful because people looking at them will be able to make suggestions about the technology. He thinks this might prevent government technology projects from failure.
I personally found this article very interesting. It seems that this guy has some great ideas that might save a lot of tax dollars from going nowhere.
References:
1. "The Nation’s C.I.O.: Government Needs a Dashboard." Saul Hansell. June 15, 2009.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/15/the-nations-co-government-needs-a-dashboard/
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I can't believe this much money is being spent on this tech stuff. That was very shocking! I also would have to agree with Mr. Kundra that we need to try and build systems based on what we already have. It seems like it will save some tax dollars and not a bad idea especially in this tough economy when times are rough.
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