I was surprised to find America’s new CIO Vivek Kundra pushing the concept of dashboards. First, although ostensibly a goal for any politician, the subject of transparency and projects usually is met with good lip service but no follow through. Kundra’s initiative is a big idea and one that should be implemented. He’s a little behind the Collaborative Networking times however as the initiative should combine dashboards with collaboration. In fact a Collaborative Dashboard that allows your average Joe the Plumber to discuss the dashboard indicators and draw conclusions from them.

“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 Mr. Kundra says oddly has not been made public before.” Not oddly as he well knows, who in government wants their bureaucratic, over budget, and year’s late project known to the masses? Can you imagine how bad the dashboards would have been for the Big Dig in Boston?

“Another measure Mr. Kundra wants the public to see on these dashboards is a bit of bureaucratic sleight of hand known as “rebaselining.” That’s when the start data of a project is retroactively moved forward to make it look less late.” There we have it. He’s touched on one of the issues. There are of course many more but that is not the focus of this article.

So why Dashboards for Government? It’s about government accountability, it helps us understand where our tax dollars are wasted and it’s about quickly viewing progress on a project without diving into the minutia. No one outside of special interests groups has time to monitor each and every pork barrel project in existence. Yet if the data was provided in graphical form and better if feeds of project data were available for enterprising entrepreneurs to analyze, we could then see individuals and businesses create tools to help reduce government project inefficiencies, costs and time overruns.

It’s quite early, and we have limited information on this dashboard initiative. But I thought it’d be interesting to consider Government Collaborative Dashboards and the potential positive impact. Collaborating wiki style around dashboards allows the voice of the citizen to be heard.

A few points and predictions:

• Collaborative Dashboards will hold public officials accountable for results which will increase tax dollar ROI. Corporations have been using dashboards for years. If you’re a public official in charge of a $2 billion project, you should be measured publically. Yes the public pressure to succeed is increased, but imagine how innovative that official becomes once his results are public.
• New groups of citizens will demand to control the metrics of these Collaborative Dashboards. Dashboards are important but only if you are measuring the right things. If you allow the public official or his committee to set the metrics, you’ll see wide-scale gaming.
• Collaborative Dashboards will engage more citizens in the development of our country. Currently, it’s too hard to track all of the projects locally much less nationally. Dashboards allow anyone the ability to quickly check status on a portfolio of government projects they have interest in. Moreover, it allows citizens the ability to discuss and share insights about the indicators.

Government projects are a broad area, too broad to analyze well in a post. Which brings me to an important point; Dashboards won’t replace effective selection and funding of these projects. They won’t stop the bridges to nowhere but may help reduce the number of pork projects in the future.

I’ll be watching developments around this initiative. How about you?