RSSThe Mother of all Dashboards
So, after running across the CIO Dashboard of Twittering CIOs last week, I had been toying with the idea of doing a post on dashboards in general. I'm of mixed opinions on them, generally; I think it's valuable and important to have relevant metrics available as close to real-time as possible, available as broadly as possible, and in as plain and understandable a format as can be managed. A good IT dashboard is a great tool for managing operations and justifying IT as an organization to the rest of the business.
On the other hand, dashboard projects frequently seem to go down the rabbit hole into minute detail of dubious value, or end up emphasizing flash and style over the substance of the information. They get pitched and constructed more as cool toys than legitimate management tools and subsequent abandonment and neglect, followed by disillusionment and distrust, are the common result.
So today I run across the Federal IT Dashboard, which is a pretty impressive piece of work detailing spending and performance on almost 40 billion dollars worth of US government IT projects and I think "Hey, this is a really big deal… if the government can pull this off and make IT project progress and costs understandable to the average citizen, why can't any enterprise do the same? What a quick result in such a massive undertaking!" until I realize that this is only a subset of a much larger dashboard, one which will cover, when completed, just about every spending project the federal government engages in. Which makes the average corporate IT dashboard project look all the more feeble.
Turns out this has all been in the works since 2006, when the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act was passed, implemented in large part by the Office of Management and Budget as of early last year. It's not perfect, but it's huge, and it was put together in three or four years by *gasp* the government. I can think of a few business types who look down their noses at government efficiency who should be so lucky as to pull off similar projects in that kind of time frame.
The entire effort points to the benefits of dashboards, however, in ways which are not always obvious. President Obama, one of the original sponsors of the 2006 bill, has made implementation a priority and federal CIO Vivek Kundra has been cracking the whip on government agencies which have been slow to comply with the disclosure requirements. I have no doubt this is viewed as a pain and a hindrance at that level, much as it would be in any corporate environment. But the very exercise of rebuilding processes to introduce more substance and transparency into uplevel reporting is bound to introduce efficiency and improve control over those same processes. A thousand eyes watching government contract allocations are sure to turn up abuse and discrepancies. While some very dedicated and proficient watchdog groups have been doing this for years, expanding their ranks to include anyone with a web browser has to frighten those who abuse these systems. The same effects can be seen in the enterprise which successfully implements such a project… all those hidden kingdoms and private efforts working at cross-purposes inside the organization can be forced to expose themselves, and either be justified or exterminated.
