What if senior management in an Agency – or anyone in the public – could identify and monitor the performance of IT projects just as easily as they could monitor the stock market or baseball scores?  That’s what the IT dashboard does  -- and it’s changing the way government does business.

Government IT projects all too often cost millions of dollars more than they should, take years longer than necessary to deploy, and deliver technologies that are obsolete by the time they are completed. Colossal failures have contributed to a significant technology gap between the public and private sector which results in dollars wasted and a government that is less responsive to the American people.  To close the technology gap, cut waste, and modernize government, the Obama Administration is taking concrete steps to deliver better results for the American people.

I am continually floored by the efforts of the US CIO to get the bloat eliminated from government IT projects. Extremely encouraging stuff.

While a productivity boom has transformed private sector performance over the past two decades, the federal government has almost entirely missed this transformation and now lags far behind on efficiency and service quality.  We are wasting billions of dollars a year, and more importantly are missing out on the huge productively improvements other sectors have benefited from.

Quite simply, we can’t significantly improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the federal government without fixing IT.

Some rather astounding (albeit not surprising) numbers on some of the horrendously wasteful projects in government IT. I hope this starts a similar movement in the other branches of government, because all told this would make a massive difference in government spending, and that's rather critical right now.

Using free and open source software for all projects where it's feasible would certainly help as well.

All of the images of the aftermath of the STILL ongoing oil spill from boston.com are amazing, but this one really hit me. If we don't learn big time from this one and make serious changes in what we're doing, we deserve nothing less than what we get.

It's too bad we humans have the astoundingly bad combination of tremendous power and even more tremendous stupidity, because it's the animals and the environment that take the hit.

Recovery.gov is the first government-wide system to move to the cloud. The move is part of the Administration’s overall efforts to cut waste and fix or end government programs that don’t work. By migrating to the public cloud, the Recovery Board is in position to leverage many advantages including the ability keep the site up as millions of Americans help report potential fraud, waste, and abuse. The Board expects savings of about $750,000 during its current budget cycle and significantly more savings in the long-term.

I continue to be pleasantly shocked when I see how progressive the current administration is with information technology. Very cool stuff.

Open Source for America (OSFA) represents more than 1,500 businesses, associations, non-governmental organizations, communities, and academic/research institutions who have come together to support and guide federal efforts to make the U.S. Government more open through the use of free and open source software.

I'm beyond pleased to see this taking shape. You can hit the link above and contribute to the discussion. The open government initiative should be based on open source software wherever possible, otherwise it falls short.

To prohibit, as an unfair and deceptive act or practice, the promotion, marketing, and advertising of any post-season NCAA Division I football game as a national championship game unless such game is the culmination of a fair and equitable playoff system.

I'm oh so incredibly glad our so-called representatives see fit to waste time on such utter nonsense when the economy's in the crapper and we still don't have national health care. Bravo, morons. Here's hoping anyone anywhere near this loses their next election.

The DoD CIO office (or ASD-NII) just has posted new open source software guidance for the whole Department of Defense! Only took about 18 months to get through, so worth it. Hopefully this puts the FUD to bed.

If it's secure enough for the Department of Defense ...

I also love that they're embracing the idea of open source as a way to better anticipate new threats. All one needs to do is look around to see that proprietary software has far more exploits than open source software, but that's still a common point of FUD.

The McMaster University researchers claim their system could be rolled out for two percent of the billion-dollars-plus already spent on the project. The report itself (PDF) also makes note of the excessive consultation spending: "By 2008, the Ministry’s eHealth Program Branch had fewer than 30 full-time employees but was engaging more than 300 consultants, a number of whom held senior management positions."

Hopefully more and more of these studies will be done on big projects and over time people will learn to at least strongly consider open source options. Especially when taxpayer money is involved it seems flat-out wrong to not investigate the potential savings offered by open source.

Congress finds the following:

(1) The growth of the Internet has enabled the creation and sharing of open content, including open educational resources.
(2) The President has proposed a new, significant Federal investment in the creation of online open-source courses for community colleges that will make learning more accessible, adaptable, and affordable for students.

Really interesting stuff and very nice to see the government thinking a bit outside the box in terms of what "open source" really means. Openness is important for far more than software.