A few weeks after the first public mentions of Vivek Kundra's IT Dashboard, it's out.

Kundra demo'd the dashboard for a few of us yesterday, and it's astonishing how quickly his office--a government one, no less--put together something so polished. I hope the dashboard becomes a model as well as a supervisor for government software development.

The dashboard provides data on the development and budget statuses of thousands of government IT contracts, allowing the public to find out where their tax dollars are going. Fantastic.

Something is still missing from the dashboard. While watching dollars is very much needed (billions are wasted every year) and it will create better government IT management, it won't necessarily lead to better government IT tools. As a government employee, I was always amazed by how often newly deployed tools completely failed to meet the needs of users. This is no doubt due to users' inability to provide feedback during the development process: a contractor normally disappears for the months or years of the development timeline, popping up to occasionally demo tools to contract managers who are not the target users. This is starkly different from how Web tools are created on the open Web. What the dashboard needs is a feature that allows government employees to actually see the alpha and beta versions of these tools from their desks, so that the government may emulate the release early, release often development model in the real world.

The dashboard helps taxpayers. It should help users, too. Of course, making this available is much more complicated than simply collating budget data. But given the speed with which Kundra is making things happen, I won't be surprised if this happens, too.