OMB IT Dashboard Needs Improvement, GAO Says
The Office of Management and Budget’s IT Dashboard needs more frequent updates and standardized milestones before it can accurately measure the federal government’s IT investments, the GAO said in a report Tuesday. OMB began the IT Dashboard website in June 2009 to improve the accountability of federal IT spending, expected to total $79 billion in FY 2011, said GAO. It’s supposed to measure near-real-time performance of IT investments made by federal agencies, but falls short, the study found.
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Of eight major IT projects GAO studied, four had “notable discrepancies” on their cost or schedule ratings. One investment supposedly had a 5 percent variance in cost every month from last July through January but actually had a 10-15 percent variance part of the time, GAO found. Another investment supposedly less than 30 days behind schedule was actually 30-90 days behind, it said.
GAO said Dashboard’s measurements lag behind real-time performance and its number of milestones measuring performance skew the results. Cost ratings for IT investments were based on data at least two months old and in some cases almost two years old, GAO found. Additionally, OMB’s guidance on milestones was so vague that several federal agencies used either too few or too many, throwing off the ratings.
Three of the five agencies surveyed didn’t use Dashboard to manage IT investments, because they used other methods, GAO’s survey found. The other two agencies used Dashboard to supplement their existing management, it found. OMB officials said they used the Dashboard to measure the performance of IT investments and it was a key source of information to determine its value. U.S. Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra told OMB that the Dashboard had “greatly improved” oversight of IT investments.
OMB officials plan to release an updated version of the IT Dashboard in July that will include ratings factoring in the performance of ongoing milestones, GAO said. OMB also developed a working group that will draft guidance for standardizing milestone reporting, GAO added.