The Clinger-Cohen Act of 1996 requires OMB to establish processes to analyze, track, and evaluate the risks and results of major capital investments in information systems made by federal agencies and report to Congress on the net program performance benefits achieved as a result of these IT investments. Further, the act places responsibility for managing investments with the heads of agencies and establishes CIOs to advise and assist agency heads in carrying out this responsibility. OMB established the Management Watch List in 2003 to help carry out its oversight role. The Management Watch List included mission-critical projects that needed to improve performance measures, project management, IT security, or overall justification for inclusion in the President’s budget submission. Further, in August 2005, OMB established a High-Risk List, which consisted of projects identified by federal agencies, with OMB’s input, as requiring special attention from oversight authorities and the highest levels of agency management. Between 2005 and 2009, OMB described its efforts to monitor and manage risky federal IT investments in the annual budget submission. Over the past several years, we have reported and testified on OMB’s initiatives to highlight troubled IT projects, justify investments, and use project management tools. For instance, in 2006 we recommended that OMB develop a single aggregated list of high-risk projects and their deficiencies and use that list to report to Congress on progress made in correcting high-risk problems. As a result, OMB started publicly releasing aggregate data on its Management Watch List and disclosing the projects’ deficiencies. Moreover, between 2007 and 2009, the President’s budget submission included an overview of investment performance over several budget years, including the number of federal IT projects in need of management attention. Such information helped Congress stay better With informed of high-risk projects and make related funding decisions.the advent of its IT Dashboard in 2009, OMB discontinued this type of reporting in the fiscal year 2010 budget submission. to allow OMB; other oversight bodies, including Congress; and the general public to hold the government agencies accountable for progress and results. OMB reported on plans and implementation progress for this management tool in the “Analytical Perspectives” section of the President’s budget submissions for fiscal years 2012 and 2013, including planned updates to the Dashboard during 2012 to support closer executive oversight and intervention to prevent schedule delays, cost overruns, and failures in delivering key functionality needed by federal programs. For example, it reported using the Dashboard to identify investments for TechStat reviews. The Dashboard visually presents performance ratings for agencies overall and for individual investments using metrics that OMB has defined—cost, schedule, and CIO evaluation. The website also provides the capability to download certain data. Figure 1 is an example of an agency’s (OPM) portfolio page as recently depicted on the Dashboard. The Dashboard’s data spans the period from June 2009 to the present, and is based, in part, on each agency’s exhibit 53 and exhibit 300 to OMB, as well as on agency assessments and submissionssupporting information on each investment. Over the life of the Dashboard, OMB has issued guidance to agencies on, among other things, what data to report, how those data need to be structured and formatted for upload to the Dashboard, and procedures for using the Dashboard’s submission tools. For instance, OMB instructed agencies to update and submit investment cost and schedule data monthly. OMB has made various changes to the organization, available data, and features of the Dashboard over time, including improvements to Dashboard calculations to incorporate the variance of “in progress” milestones rather than just “completed” milestones; web pages containing data on historical ratings and rebaselines of eliminated and downgraded investments; added data on awarded contracts, with links to USAspending.gov; release of IT Dashboard source code and documentation to an open source hosting provider; enhancements to baseline history, which give users the ability to see field-by-field changes for each rebaseline; a mechanism for OMB analysts to provide feedback to agencies on mobile-friendly formatting of Dashboard displays. Once OMB has received agency-reported investment data, it converts these into investment performance ratings for display on the dashboard according to calculations and protocols described on its website. OMB assigns cost and schedule performance ratings by using data submitted by agencies to calculate variances between the planned cost or schedule targets and the actual or projected cost or schedule values. OMB converts these variances to percentages, and assigns the ratings to be presented on the Dashboard within three ranges, red, yellow, and green, as shown in table 1. Although the thresholds for assigning cost and schedule variance ratings has remained constant over the life of the Dashboard, the cost and schedule data agencies are required to submit have changed in several ways, as have the variance calculations. For example, in response to our recommendations (further discussed in the next 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 more accurate reflection of current investment status. 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 reportedDashboard were not always accurate for the investments we 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 that the cost and schedule ratings on OMB’s completed activities. Similarly, in March 2011, we reportedhad 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; 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. More recently, in November 2011, we reported 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 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) and the agency concurred. Since we previously recommended that OMB improve how it rates investments, we did not make any further recommendations. GAO-12-210. investment into a color for depiction on the Dashboard. 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. According to OMB’s instructions, a CIO rating should reflect the level of risk facing an investment on a scale from 1 (high risk) to 5 (low risk) relative to that investment’s ability to accomplish its goals. Each agency CIO is to assess their IT investments against a set of six preestablished evaluation factors identified by OMB (shown in table 2) and then assign a rating of 1 to 5 based on his or her best judgment of the level of risk facing the investment. 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 recommends that CIOs consult with appropriate stakeholders in making their evaluation, including Chief Acquisition Officers, program managers, and other interested parties. Ultimately, CIO ratings are assigned colors for presentation on the Dashboard, according to the five- point rating scale, as illustrated in table 3. OMB has made the CIO’s evaluation and rating a key component of its larger IT Reform Initiative and 25 Point Plan. In its plan, OMB reported that it used agencies’ CIO ratings to select investments for the TechStat review sessions it conducted between 2010 and 2011. These sessions are data-driven assessments of IT investments by agency leaders that are intended to result in concrete action to improve performance. OMB reported that the TechStats it conducted on selected investments resulted in approximately $3 billion in reduced costs. Building on the results of those sessions, the plan articulates a strategy for strengthening IT governance, in part, through the adoption of the TechStat model by federal agencies. In conducting TechStats, agencies are to rely, in part, on CIO ratings from the IT Dashboard. The TechStat Toolkit, developed by OMB and a task force of agency leads, provides sample questions regarding an investment’s CIO rating and associated risks for use in TechStat sessions.