Remember my slightly-successful attempt to understand and digest the Proposed 2015 Federal Budget, submitted by the President Obama?? It was a painstaking endeavor and had me dreaming of more automation!

Well, did you know the office of the US government has a Federal IT Dashboard? “The IT Dashboard is a website enabling federal agencies, industry, the general public and other stakeholders to view details of federal information technology investments.” The FY2015 edition was released yesterday (April 1st) and allows you to compare spending over time, explore spending throughout the portfolio and search/filter investments. The dashboard has all the features you would expect: drill down, filtering, sorting, charts/graphs and export. Watch the video to see how it works.

Here’s a high level fact: in 2014, the top 3 agencies with the most IT spend are: DOD (Defense), HHS (Health & Human Services) and DHS (Homeland Security) with $31.3B, $9.6B and $5.8B, respectively.

The HHS spending peaked my interest, given the recent debacles with Healthcare.gov. As I perused the website I found sorting by Primary BRM Service Code to be the easiest option to understand (see pie chart of the top 10 expenses). The biggest portion, $217 million, of the Health Care Administration was spent in an investment called CMS Quality Program,  headed by Frank Baitman (CIO). The programs goal is “is to provide a common IT platform to support QIO business operations, promote application, data & information sharing, and to support management information.” And if you click on the investment title, you can get even more details by mandate, like this one for HHS.

One of the unexpected things I found on the site was a scorecard that shows progress, by agency/CIO, toward a mandate issued by the president Obama in May 2012 (click here).  

While there’s a lot to comprehend, pick the agency you want to know more about and use the many drill-downs to get more details. #InformationIsPower

Happy learning!