[LINK] Transparency of government IT projects
Jan Whitaker
jwhit at janwhitaker.com
Wed Feb 15 13:21:08 AEDT 2012
This is fabulous. I wonder if the Australian government would even
consider 1/4 as much transparency and data access at this provides.
http://www.itdashboard.gov/ - Watch the over at the bottom of the
page to get an idea of what is available.
Jan
Pressing the technology reset button
Mahesh Sharma
February 15, 2012 - 12:03PM
When US President Obama first took office in November 2008, he
challenged the inaugural US Government chief information officer
Vivek Kundra to hit the reset button on technology in the public sector.
It was the first time an incoming president identified technology as
a key area of reform, alongside national security, healthcare and the
economy. The US government is the world's biggest IT shop, with a
$US80 billion budget and 12,000 systems globally.
Undaunted by governments' well-known reluctance to change, Kundra
relished the opportunity to lead the team known as 'tigre'
(technology innovation and government reform).
"I vividly remember how we got together for the first time, and the
president challenged us to think about how do you create a 21st
century government," Kundra said in Sydney this week.
"How do we actually make sure the investments being made in
technology are going to produce dividends for the American people?"
Armed with a vision and experience overhauling local government IT,
he quickly discovered federal government was a very different beast
with a preconceived notion of how technology was to be deployed.
His first day in the White House famously played out as President
Obama fought tooth-and-nail to use a Blackberry. Days later, Kundra
discovered more than $US20 billion in taxpayer money was invested in
IT projects that were years behind schedule and millions of dollars
over budget.
His solution was to boost individual accountability in the government
by promoting transparency. He declared before a senate hearing that
within 60 days he would launch an <http://www.itdashboard.gov/>online
IT dashboard to rank the performance of every IT project and every
CIO in federal government agencies publicly.
The idea was simple: projects were ranked then colour-coded red,
yellow, and green ($US27 billion of government IT spending was in the
'red'), and the public could comment on the projects.
The dashboard is now used by the government to make IT budget
decisions and has been released to industry as
<http://sourceforge.net/projects/it-dashboard/>open source via
SourceForge to help others benchmark their projects. It met with some
criticism when first launched, as government agencies and third-party
organisations claimed to have found innacuracies, according to an
Information Week Government report.
[snip - more at link:
http://www.theage.com.au/it-pro/government-it/pressing-the-technology-reset-button-20120215-1t56p.html
]
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
jwhit at janwhitaker.com
blog: http://janwhitaker.com/jansblog/
business: http://www.janwhitaker.com
Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or
sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth.
~Madeline L'Engle, writer
_ __________________ _
More information about the Link
mailing list