A planned expansion of Office of Management and Budget "TechStat" meetings requires $60 million in congressional appropriations, Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra told a House panel March 17.

Speaking before the House Appropriations subcommittee on financial services and general government, Kundra said that the $60 million OMB requests for fiscal 2012 in a line item called "Integrated Efficient and Effective Uses of Information Technology" would go to supporting the meetings. TechStat would increase in scope to not just examinations of troubled agency information technology projects, but to a search for duplication across the federal government, Kundra added.

Kundra began conducting TechStat reviews, which are 60-minute meetings meant to analyze project shortcoming and develop remedies, in January 2010; they have resulted in a $3 billion cost avoidance, OMB says.

"What's difficult, as you look at these TechStat sessions, is not the act of just conducting the TechStat sessions," Kundra said.

"It's actually the follow-through and the follow up, which takes countless hours and resources to make sure that if Agency A has committed to making sure that they're going live in one month, that we come back a month from then and say 'You said you would go live, what happened?'"

OMB selects projects for TechStat review according to data posted online at the IT Dashboard, OMB and Kundra have repeatedly said. Two Government Accountability Office reports--the latest as recently as March 15--have cast doubts on the reliability of dashboard information, however.

Referring to the dashboard, Kundra said he insisted during the dashboard's creation on posting pictures of agency CIOs onto the pages containing assessments of agency IT programs.

"In this administration, one of the first things we did is we said 'There's this culture of faceless accountability where everybody is pointing to everybody else in terms of why projects fail,'" which is why Kundra decided to post the pictures online, he told the subcommittee.

"That was actually pretty radical, everybody hated me at that point," he added.

For more:
- go to the subcommittee hearing webpage (prepared testimonies and webcast available)

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