We all know that well-implemented performance management increases the likelihood of successful implementation of IT programs. What caught my eye in the title of this article Federal procurement officials not ready for Web 2.0, survey says -- Federal Computer Week , was the reference to Web 2.0, and survey results that reveal  “While nearly half of federal procurement professionals want to improve transparency, most are not ready to leverage Web 2.0 technologies or invite citizens to participate.” Indeed, with any new technology resistance is expected, and adoption by the masses follows a deployment curve. However, what troubles me about the survey referred to in this article is not the lack of adoption of Web 2.0, but the lack of adoption of more traditional practices, particularly performance management as evidenced by the low use of Earned Value Management.

There was an article in the Wall Street Journal last week entitled " U.S. Freeze on Technology Projects Sends Shivers Through the Industry."  It got the attention of a couple of people up the line in our organization and I suspect the IT vendors in the government market got more than one alert from their web monitoring services.  Needless to say, we're getting questions from our vendor clients like "What's this mean for federal IT spending?  Is it going to slow down?  Are the Feds cutting back?  What's going to happen?"  All well and good, those are questions we're in the business of answering.  So, what do we tell them?

This week, IDC Government Insights introduces a concept that we’re calling the Tagged Data Authority Engine (TDAE).  We’re also issuing a call for government-wide coordination that can help build the actual set of solutions that the TDAE proposes.

The idea behind the TDAE is to improve the quality and accuracy of data that is shared between federal agencies and also between local, state and national government entities. The need for this type of solution is increasingly important as the government expands its use of data fusion centers, shared service centers, and cloud services. Right now, these centers could be importing outdated data without realizing it.

Our TDAE idea evolved out of multiple conversations with government IT administrators, who told us, quite frankly, that when data is shared between agencies it is often done in a way that eventually leads to incorrect or outdated information. The main issue? Once sets of data are exchanged they often are not updated in a routine way, and it’s not always possible for the agency that receives a file to know how old a set of data is, or who controls it.