The General Service Administration (GSA) is ready to launch an updated Federal IT Dashboard by mid-March this year. GSA developed the new dashboard after receiving $3.5 million in the fiscal 2020 Defense authorization bill, which was part of the Office of Management and Budget's plan to move the control and management of the dashboard to GSA.
The new portal will follow the best practices outlined by the U.S. Digital Services. It will use web standards, ensure 508 accessibility compliance, have much improved and advanced search capabilities that let users type in a keyword, and filter down by agency, cost, or CIO ratings.
Dan York, the director of data transparency for the Office of Government wide Policy at GSA, said this would be the first significant change to the portal since the Office of Management and Budget released it in 2009.
York said, "We went ahead and actually split it up. We split up the back-end data input from agency facing [and] from the public consumption, the external facing. So it'll wind up being two applications. The public will only ever see the one," York said on Ask the CIO. "But behind the scenes, there'll be two. The IT Collect API will be an agency-facing API-only application for the data ingester. Then the front end will be the visualization platform, which the public will know is the Federal IT Dashboard. When they go to ITdashboard.gov, you'll see all the pretty pictures that the visualization platform has to offer."
The portal will allow users to search the whole federal government's IT portfolio for several keywords and filter down to interactive visualizations. The agency analysis pages will allow users to select data points within a set they want to see and the agencies they want to see the data for and then toggle on and off. It will also enable users to create custom visualizations or data sets within a range.
The goal is to make the government's data more available, transparent, visible, and, hopefully, a little more ingestible.
The new IT dashboard will allow agencies and OMB to update the site more regularly and allow the users to see that data instead of submitting the whole Exhibit 53 as they do now. They can send an update for just the thing that needs to be corrected or just the part that needs to be updated. Then the users can see those updates over time.
But York said GSA is working with OMB and agencies to identify additional data sets to add over time and connect to as a way to provide a complete picture of federal IT spending.
York said GSA would continue to iterate the dashboard after the initial launch, including offering an advanced version for agencies using Technology Business Management (TBM) framework and other data.
When the new Federal IT Dashboard goes live soon after the White House releases President Joe Biden's 2023 budget request, it will feature mostly capital planning and investment control (CPIC) data.
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