Web Dashboards: A Window Into Government PerformanceWeb Dashboards: A Window Into Government Performance

In the federal government, first there was the IT Dashboard for big-ticket project tracking, then came the Open Government Dashboard, the Department of Veterans Affairs' IT Dashboard, and last week, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs' dashboard.

The OIRA dashboard aims to help the public better understand the rulemaking process in government and track rules as they move through the system, letting people know whether the rule in question, for example, could have an economic impact greater than $100 million and how long it has been under review.

It's another site in the ever-growing array of online government performance dashboards, typically Web portals with graphical representations of spending or performance data pulled from backend databases, sometimes mashed up with geodata. The primary dashboard for government spending, USASpending.gov, is about to get a major facelift.

The trend isn't limited to the federal government. Public-facing performance dashboards have sprouted up in Washington, D.C., the state of Washington, Texas, Boston, and elsewhere.

Several factors are driving dashboard implementation. The Obama administration's government transparency initiatives are a major catalyst. In addition to the dashboards already launched, plans call for a financial data quality dashboard, a performance management dashboard, an R&D spending dashboard, and even for a dashboard of dashboards, federal CIO Vivek Kundra said in an interview with information.

"There's an underlying architecture of dashboards in development, making sure on one hand that we're serving specific communities -- for example, one about transportation, another about IT -- and allowing you to slice, dice, integrate and even create your own dashboard as a widget that can be embedded in your own page," Kundra said.

Public demand is the second major factor driving this wave of dashboards. The Internet and easy access to information is almost taken for granted today, and people are interested in keeping their government accountable and having access to government-produced information. The Open Government Dashboard, for one, is being developed with public input. "For too long, Americans have been wary of this secrecy in Washington, and information has been locked up," Kundra said.

Finally, the market and government appear ready from a technology standpoint. Companies in the private sector have been using performance dashboards products from Oracle, IBM Cognos, and SAP Business Objects tools for years as executive decision-making tools. As governments develop more sophisticated financial management processes, they're following suit. "Public sector entities are beginning to get a grip on the budgeting and planning lifecycle and making it more automated with budget and planning tools that have the ability to project the fiscal impact and the impact of revenue of government into quality of life of citizens," said Peter Doolan, VP and CTO for Oracle's public sector business.

"It's going to be fascinating to watch because these dashboards can show everything that takes place inside financial management and performance management inside government," he added. "There's not much different between a public sector entity and a large multi-national company, and they have the same ERPs, but now they're exposing all this data."

In fact, the same software from Oracle, SAP, IBM and others behind performance management dashboards in the private sector are powering public dashboards. In another example, ESRI's geographic mapping and analysis capabilities support Uncle Sam's Recovery.gov site. On the front end, the federal IT Dashboard was built with Drupal, with data visualization by the FusionCharts Suite and Adobe Flash. In its first iteration, the Veterans Affairs IT Dashboard employs PDF files.

The state of Washington's Transportation Improvement Board Performance Management Dashboard, which uses SAP software, offers a pie chart of the state's transportation project budget and metrics as detailed as the pavement conditions at a particular intersection or turnaround times for bid awards in southwest Washington. Visitors to Texas' "Where The Money Goes" site, also powered by SAP, can drill down to the level of the Attorney General's office spending $129.75 on printing services at Wal-Mart on November 5, 2008.

Beyond data transparency, agencies can use dashboards to strive for more effective government. Kundra refers to the "forcing function" of the federal IT dashboard—in essence, transparency leads to accountability. "It's very important not just to shine a light, but to get the A-level people involved," he said.

At the federal level, Kundra and federal CTO Aneesh Chopra have been deeply involved in getting dashboards up and running. Kundra has begun regular, executive-level performance management reviews, called TechStat, that are based on information generated by the IT Dashboard.

In Washington state, the initial goal was to modernize performance management in order to conquer financial difficulties and delayed, untraceable projects. The agency director's vision was to put a new management framework in place, then to make data accessible to the public. In addition to saving millions of dollars by analyzing data surfaced by the dashboard, feedback from communities and citizens using the site has influenced how the department now directs funds to its projects, according to Sherry Amos, executive director of industry strategy for SAP public services. Washington's example speaks to two key roles that David Treworgy, IBM U.S. federal business analytics and optimization partner, sees for dashboards and government.

"Clearly, increasing trust and accountability is an important goal of transparency, but it's also important to think about how dashboards have been successful in the private sector and apply that to the public sector," he said. "The goal in the private sector is to take that information and then use predictive analytics to think about how to make decisions on the future. I think it's still an open question how the administration and state and local governments will end up utilizing this in that way."

There's a debate underway about just how much government data to release and how to do it. On one side are people like Clay Johnson, director of open government group Sunlight Labs, who expresses concern that dashboards tend to over-editorialize data. While it's critical to release "big, ambitious metrics," he would rather be able to get raw data and let citizens make their own dashboards than look at colorful pie charts.

Government data is most useful when it maintains its "fidelity," said Oracle's Doolan. "What's really important is the degree of separation of the data from the operational systems," Doolan said. "If you have too many degrees, the data is stale, out of date or doesn't have enough relation to what's actually happening in the enterprise. The closer it is, the less reinterpretation of data you have."

At the same time, there's trepidation about publicly releasing government performance data. Government managers worry they'll be bombarded with calls from citizens concerned about small expenditures.

Data quality, or lack of if, is another issue. Releasing inaccurate data opens agencies to public criticism, as the feds found when the first round of stimulus funding data began pouring in to Recovery.gov. Such scrutiny ultimately leads to improvements in data quality better, Kundra has pointed out. Indeed, problems with data quality helped spur the creation of a federal spending data quality working group, made up largely of agency CFOs, which will work to ensure the government has adequate quality controls in place.

Treworgy said data quality is more important than quantity. "Just putting out reams of data isn't really helpful," he said, pointing to the fact that even IBM's CEO has a dashboard of only 10 metrics or so.

Because they serve much larger constituencies, however, government agencies will be expected to provide high-quality data and more of it. As a result, their new Web dashboards will have to be good at both.

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