GSA to replace federal IT Dashboard at next White House budget proposal

The General Services Administration will replace the federal IT Dashboard when the White House submits its proposed fiscal 2023 budget to Congress in about a month, according to IT Data Transparency Director Dan York.

Two applications — the IT Collect Application Programming Interface (API) and the Office of Government-wide Policy (OGP) Visualization Platform — will supplant the legacy dashboard, following a year-long modernization effort.

The federal IT Dashboard was launched in June 2009 to provide federal agencies and the public with the ability to view details of over 7,000 agency IT investments online and to track progress over time.

The IT Data Transparency Division within OGP‘s Office of Information Integrity and Access wants to enable agencies’ chief executive officers and the Office of Management and Budget to make better, data-driven decisions using the new ITdashboard.gov.

“The legacy application was built over 10 years, it was sort of hodgepodged together, it had many different vendors, it had many different hands,” York said, during an ACT-IAC session Wednesday. “And rather than trying to retrofit it to a modern society, it was better just to rescope it, to rebuild it.”

IT Collect API will gather data from agencies using the latest standards and code capabilities, as well as handle future data calls from OMB and other agencies OMB allows.

The OGP Visualization Platform will use that API and others to ingest data and make it publicly available for visualizations.

“The hope is to have one place for agencies to submit their IT management data, one place for OMB to go see agency IT management data, and then one place for the public to go find out about what the government does and be transparent in our IT management and budget expenses,” York said.

York’s division employed an agile, customer-focused approach — relying on feedback from working sessions with OMB, the Government Accountability Office and other agencies — to make both apps user friendly for the public and Congress members.

Neither app needs to be a sole source of truth, but both need to collect data across systems of record to make it public.

“We don’t want to be a [Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency] security dashboard,” York said. “We don’t want to be a dashboard about FISMA compliance or identity management, that are very good systems of record that do that already.”