Well, I have to say, it is very interesting to see one of the more powerful new Portfolio Reporting solutions be one from the US Government.  As part of an initiative to provide visibility into IT spending, the US Government posted what I would see as a huge leap forward in simplicity of reporting from a Portfolio environment.  Although the system is very slick and relies heavily on Adobe Flash technology, I am not quite sure the technology used to run the system.  From the FAQ system, it would seem there is a manual-input system in place for people to update their status but that might cause issues due to a manual intervention.

To view the Dashboard, go here:

http://bit.ly/MvUSh

You will find there are a number of ways to view the data.  From the home page, you can click on “Investments”, then click on any given agency to drill-down:

Once you selected, you can drill-down into the projects.  Here, I found a project that was showing as being in a “red” state from the primary dashboard page, but interestingly the Contractor’s name is not found (in many cases, actually) and then when you click to view performance metrics and other items, you get a “Page Not Found” error.  Either bugs are being worked out or there are other mysterious forces at work, but it is still good a good start.

Further enhancements listed include earned value reporting and other more powerful features.  I am going to be watching this closely, as I’m sure you will be.  Personally, I think this forward-facing, interactive reporting is the way of the future and how we will see more reporting solutions work.  Instead of building one-off reports, they are part of an overall site design allowing users to peruse data and subscribe to information of interest to them rather than being limited to a set of static pages.

Great first start!

-Bill