Technology

Reading the dashboard: Measuring government’s tech effort

The Obama administration has embraced online dashboards as a better way to share data internally and with the public. The IBM Center\'s Sukumar Ganapati joined ...

Federal News Network Staff

August 1, 2011 10:03 am

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wfedstaff | June 4, 2015 9:26 am

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The Obama administration has embraced dashboards as a better way to share data internally and with the public. They’ve been used across the government to cut costs and increase transparency. So could dashboards become standard-operating procedure for the government?

Sukumar Ganapati, associate professor of public administration at Florida International University, authored a recent report about the use of dashboards in government for the IBM Center for the Business of Government.

In the early days of the Obama Administration, policymakers set out to provide a tool that helped the government “make sense of the deluge of data it receives,” according to the report.

One example is the Federal Information Technology Dashboard, which acted as a repository of the government’s technology investments, which federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra said has been instrumental in his efforts to reform federal IT and save $3 billion in technology spending.

The report’s author Ganapati joined Federal Drive to discuss the use of dashboards in the federal government and whether they’ve lived up to their tech promise.