While IT can enrich people’s lives and improve organizational performance, we have previously reported that federal IT projects too frequently incur cost overruns and schedule slippages while contributing little to mission-related outcomes. For example, in July 2013, we testified that the federal government continued to spend billions of dollars on troubled IT investments and we identified billions of dollars worth of failed and challenged IT projects. OMB plays a key role in overseeing how federal agencies manage their IT investments by working with them to better plan, justify, and determine how to manage them. Each year, OMB and federal agencies work together to determine how much the government plans to spend on IT projects and how these funds are to be allocated. OMB also guides agencies in developing sound business cases for IT investments and establishing management processes for overseeing these investments throughout their life cycles. The scope of this undertaking is quite large: in planning for fiscal year 2014, 27 federal agencies reported plans to spend about $82 billion on IT.investments, $37.6 billion is to be spent on non-major IT investments, and $5.5 billion is to be spent on classified Department of Defense IT investments. Of that, $38.7 billion is to be spent on major IT Within OMB, the Office of E-Government and Information Technology, headed by the Federal CIO, directs the policy and strategic planning of federal IT investments and is responsible for oversight of federal information technology spending. In June 2009, OMB deployed a public Web site to further improve the transparency and oversight of agencies’ IT investments. Known as the IT Dashboard,performance data for over 700 major federal IT investments at 27 federal agencies, accounting for $38.7 billion of those agencies’ planned $82 billion budget for fiscal year 2014. According to OMB, these data are intended to provide a near-real-time perspective on the performance of these investments, as well as a historical perspective. Further, the public display of these data is intended to allow OMB; other oversight bodies, including Congress; and the general public to hold the government agencies accountable for progress and results. this site displays federal agencies’ cost, schedule, and The Dashboard visually presents performance ratings for agencies and for individual investments using metrics that OMB has defined—cost, schedule, and CIO evaluation. The Web site also provides the capability to download certain data. Figure 1 is an example of VA’s portfolio page as recently depicted on the Dashboard. (The ratings are explained in the narrative following the figure.) The Dashboard’s data spans the period from its June 2009 inception to the present, and is based, in part, on agency assessments of individual investment performance and each agency’s budget submissions to OMB. The cost and schedule data agencies are required to submit to the Dashboard have changed over time, as have the related calculations. For example, in response to our recommendations (further discussed in the following section), OMB changed how the Dashboard calculates the cost and schedule ratings in July 2010 to include “in progress” milestones rather than just “completed” ones for a more accurate reflection of current investment status. While the required cost and schedule data have changed, the thresholds for assigning cost and schedule ratings have remained constant over the life of the Dashboard. Specifically, the Dashboard assigns rating colors (red, yellow, green) based on agency- submitted cost and schedule variances, as shown in table 1. Unlike the variance-based cost and schedule ratings, the Dashboard’s “Investment Evaluation by Agency CIO” (also called the CIO rating) is determined by agency officials. According to OMB’s instructions, each agency CIO is to assess his or her IT investments against a set of six pre- established evaluation factors identified by OMB (shown in table 2) and then assign a rating of 1 (high risk) to 5 (low risk) based on the CIO’s best judgment of the level of risk facing the investment. OMB recommends that CIOs consult with appropriate stakeholders in making their evaluation, including Chief Acquisition Officers, program managers, and other interested parties. According to an OMB staff member, agency CIOs are responsible for determining appropriate thresholds for the risk levels and for applying them to investments when assigning CIO ratings. OMB requires agencies to update these ratings as soon as new information becomes available which will affect an investment’s assessment. After agencies assign a level of risk to each investment, the Dashboard assigns colors to CIO ratings according to a five-point scale, as illustrated in table 3. An OMB staff member from the Office of E-Government and Information Technology noted that the CIO rating should be a current assessment of future performance based on historical results and is the only Dashboard performance indicator that has been defined and produced the same way since the Dashboard’s inception. Furthermore, OMB issued guidance in August 2011other things, that agency CIOs shall be held accountable for the performance of IT program managers based on their governance process and the data reported on the IT Dashboard, which includes the CIO rating. According to OMB, the addition of CIO names and photos on Dashboard investments is intended to highlight this accountability and link it to the Dashboard’s reporting on investment performance. We have previously reported that OMB has taken significant steps to enhance the oversight, transparency, and accountability of federal IT investments by creating its IT Dashboard, and by improving the accuracy of investment ratings. We also found issues with the accuracy and data reliability of cost and schedule data, and recommended steps that OMB should take to improve these data. In July 2010, we reportedOMB’s Dashboard were not always accurate for the investments we that the cost and schedule ratings on reviewed, because these ratings did not take into consideration current performance. As a result, the ratings were based on outdated information. We recommended that OMB report on its planned changes to the Dashboard to improve the accuracy of performance information and provide guidance to agencies to standardize milestone reporting. OMB agreed with our recommendations and, as a result, updated the Dashboard’s cost and schedule calculations to include both ongoing and completed activities. Similarly, our report in March 2011 noted that OMB had initiated several efforts to increase the Dashboard’s value as an oversight tool, and had used its data to improve federal IT management. We also reported, however, that agency practices and the Dashboard’s calculations contributed to inaccuracies in the reported investment performance data. For instance, we found missing data submissions or erroneous data at each of the five agencies we reviewed, along with instances of inconsistent program baselines and unreliable source data. As a result, we recommended that the agencies take steps to improve the accuracy and reliability of their Dashboard information, and that OMB improve how it rates investments relative to current performance and schedule variance. Most agencies generally concurred with our recommendations and three have taken steps to address our recommendation. OMB agreed with our recommendation for improving ratings for schedule variance. It disagreed with our recommendation to improve how it reflects current performance in cost and schedule ratings, but more recently made changes to Dashboard calculations to address this while also noting challenges in comprehensively evaluating cost and schedule data for these investments. We also reported on OMB’s guidance to agencies for reporting their IT investments in September 2011 and found that it did not ensure complete reporting. Specifically, agencies differed on what investments they included as an IT investment. Among other things, we recommended that OMB clarify its guidance on reporting IT investments to specify whether certain types of systems—such as space systems—are to be included. OMB did not agree that further efforts were needed to clarify reporting in regard to the types of systems. Subsequently, in November 2011, we noted that the accuracy of investment cost and schedule ratings had improved since our July 2010 report because OMB had refined the Dashboard’s cost and schedule calculations. Most of the ratings for the eight investments we reviewed as part of our November 2011 report were accurate, although we noted that more could be done to inform oversight and decision making by emphasizing recent performance in the ratings. We recommended that the General Services Administration comply with OMB’s guidance for updating its ratings when new information becomes available (including when investments are rebaselined). The agency concurred and has since taken actions to address this recommendation. Since we previously recommended that OMB improve how it rates investments, we did not make any further recommendations. More recently, in October 2012 we reported that CIOs at six agencies rated a majority of investments listed on the federal IT Dashboard as low or moderately low risk from June 2009 through March 2012. Additionally, two agencies, the Department of Defense and the National Science Foundation, rated no investments as high or moderately high risk during this time period. Agencies generally followed OMB’s instructions for assigning CIO ratings, although the Department of Defense’s ratings were unique in reflecting additional considerations, such as the likelihood of OMB review. Most of the selected agencies reported various benefits associated with producing and reporting CIO ratings, such as increased quality of their performance data and greater transparency and visibility of investments. We recommended that OMB analyze agencies’ investment risk over time as reflected in the Dashboard’s CIO ratings and present its analysis with the President’s annual budget submission, and that the Department of Defense ensure that its CIO ratings reflect available investment performance assessments and its risk management guidance. Both agencies concurred with our recommendations, and OMB reported on CIO rating trends in the fiscal year 2014 budget submission; however, the Department of Defense has not updated any of its ratings since September 2012. Further, we studied OMB’s efforts to help agencies address IT projects with cost overruns, schedule delays, and performance shortfalls in June 2013. In particular, we reported that OMB used CIO ratings from the Dashboard, among other sources, to select at- risk investments for reviews known as TechStats.