[Infowarrior] - Government Launches Web Site to Track IT Spending

[Richard Forno]

Government Launches Web Site to Track IT Spending
By Kim Hart
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 30, 2009 10:29 AM

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/30/AR2009063001370_pf.html

NEW YORK, June 30 -- Vivek Kundra, the federal chief information  
officer, on Tuesday announced a new Web site designed to track more  
than $70 billion in government information technology spending,  
showing all contracts held by major firms within every agency.

The revamped site, USAspending.gov, was launched early this morning,  
and Kundra unveiled it at the Personal Democracy Forum conference on  
technology and politics. The site shows detailed information about  
whether IT contracts are being monitored and budgets being met.

"Everyone knows there have been spectacular failures when it comes to  
technology investments," Kundra said. "Now for the first time the  
entire country can see how we're spending money and give us input."

The site is the latest effort by Kundra and the Office of Management  
and Budget to make data about the government's projects and  
performance visible to the public. Citizens and Web developers can  
parse the data, combine it with other data sets and publish the  
results on Web feeds or their Facebook profiles. The data also show  
which contracts were won through a competitive process or in a no-bid  
method, which has been criticized by good-government advocates for  
excluding firms from business opportunities. Each prime contractor is  
listed as well as the status of that project; sub-contractors are not  
yet shown on the site.

Last month, Kundra launched Data.gov, a repository for data feeds that  
are publicly available but often hard to find. The site started with  
47 data sets. Kundra said there are now more than 100,000.

Kundra's announcement was met with cheers and a standing ovation from  
the Twittering crowd at a Lincoln Center auditorium. The launch  
fulfills one of the promises Kundra made to Congress, in which he  
pledged to develop a new way of monitoring federal technology spending  
by the end of June.

Launching a site that makes spending practices open to the public met  
some opposition from the agencies' chief information officers and  
government contractors, some of whom were nervous about letting  
citizens who aren't familiar with the contracting process and  
technology needs of the government judge the spending decisions.  
Kundra said he met with every agency and dozens of company executives  
over the past six weeks.

"I talked to the CIO Council and saw the data change overnight,"  
Kundra said. "It was cleaned up immediately when people realized it  
was going to be made public."

A federal report last year found that $30 billion worth of IT projects  
were not going smoothly or were in danger of failing. Kundra pointed  
to a $6 million project to use wireless devices in gathering  
information for the U.S. Census. After two years, it was deemed  
unsuccessful and census takers reverted to using the old paper-based  
system.

"We've seen this with system after system," he said. "Vendors over- 
promise and budgets have run away in terms of excessive spending.  
We're trying to provide you with the tools to let American people show  
us a better way."

Because the data change frequently as IT contracts change, the feeds  
run the risk of containing inaccuracies. Maintaining and updating the  
databases is also labor-intensive and some agencies say the initiative  
creates an enormous workload for them.

"There is a good chance you'll go through this and find places where  
the data is wrong, and that's okay," said Macon Phillips, new media  
director for the White House. "I'd rather have this up and out there  
than not at all."