IW500: Federal CIO Vivek Kundra Sees More Cloud ComputingIW500: Federal CIO Vivek Kundra Sees More Cloud Computing

The federal government recently launched a Web site that includes performance metrics data on major government IT projects. But officials are now thinking about ways to create sites that could inform the public about how effectively dollars are being spent on non-technology projects, federal CIO Vivek Kundra said Monday in his keynote address at the information 500 Conference.

"We're looking at dashboards across-the-board in terms of healthcare, energy, and education so you can see how your government performs," Kundra said at the Dana Point, Calif. gathering.

"Within its first 60 days, the [Obama] administration said we need to change the game in Washington and how we share information around investments. The IT Dashbaord was just laying the first brick."

It's unclear how those performance dashboards will look in their final forms, when they will be launched, what data they will include, what the next dashboard will be, or even if plans are yet finalized. However, it's the IT Dashboard's success that has likely been instrumental in pushing the idea forward for other dashboards.

The IT Dashboard is a Web site where the public can dig into data on major IT projects underway at each of the cabinet-level federal agencies, including information on whether projects are on time and on budget, thorough descriptions of projects, and in some cases deeper metrics on completion and performance of various parts of the projects.

Since its launch earlier this year, the IT Dashboard has received more than 50 million page views, and according to Kundra, has led many agency secretaries to have tough conversations with CIOs about their IT successes and failures.

However, there are numerous challenges for any future dashboard efforts, especially when they move from IT spending to issues that could be bigger political footballs and have far fuzzier outcomes, like healthcare and energy spending.

Even with the IT Dashboard, Kundra initially encountered some resistance, partially because "everybody worried conversations were going to turn negative." That hasn't yet happened, Kundra said. However, in the era of healthcare town halls filled with rage, it would be premature at best to say that data posted on a healthcare dashboard would similarly be met with cordial response.

The idea of dashboards gets at the larger administration priority of transparency that's been a keystone of Kundra's CIO role so far. The federal IT chief has been instrumental in pushing the open government ideals espoused in the missions of sites such as Data.gov and Recovery.gov. "We need to make sure citizens know how the government operates and how it makes decisions on a day-to-day basis," he said. Kundra sees an opportunity not just for the public to be a better government watchdog, but also for transparency to spur innovation. Data.gov, for example, has already led to the creation of more than 40 new applications that make use of the public data posted there.

"The power of unlocking data and democratizing it is its ability to have a transformative effect on the way we get innovation," he said, pointing to earlier data dumps that have led to commercial innovation such as GPS data from the military and human genome data from the National Institute of Health, Kundra said.

In that vein, putting more and more public data online could also tax agencies by forcing them to make sure the systems and data hosting locations they choose can withstand public demand for the new data. "As we become more open and transparent, we’re going to require some changes in investments to make sure to be able to handle surges in demand," he said.

In his keynote, Kundra focused largely on the challenge of meeting presidential priorities of effective IT management, cybersecurity, transparency, and efficiency in such a massive organization -- $76 billion in IT spending and 10,679 IT systems -- with such diverse missions as defense, health, energy, education and transportation.

Beyond the IT Dashboard, Kundra wants to get agencies to rethink how they spend on infrastructure and new platforms. "I don’t think we’ve been doing a good job historically of the investments we are doing," he said. "They’ve been too agency-centric, too siloed. We need to make sure CIOs are focused on looking at how they can serve the American people, and get away from a model of investing heavily in infrastructure where it doesn’t yield value."

For too long, Kundra implied, federal CIOs have been focused on networks and architecture almost as technology for technology’s sake, and not for the sake of real outcomes.

Another way to enable CIOs to have conversations about outcomes is to place less emphasis on spending and managing infrastructure, Kundra said. He has been a big advocate of cloud computing, and this is one of the reasons.

On Tuesday, Kundra will speak at NASA's Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, where he’s widely expected to launch a new Website that aims to make it easier for federal agencies to procure cloud-based services.

Kundra acknowledges that the site is just a first step, and that there is a long series of issues that need to be worked through before many federal agencies are able to move some of their data and applications into the cloud.

Federal agencies have given him more resistance with cloud computing investments than with releasing data. "This is going to take time," he said. "It’s not going to happen tomorrow, but we need to make sure the industry is able to address concerns about cybersecurity, who owns the data, and where the data lives."

He says, however, that "we want to be able to provision services and scale them on demand and make sure we’re actually delivering solutions to our customers."

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