"It's okay if a project is behind schedule as long as we understand what is causing the delay," Kundra said. "We need to understand the root cause so we can solve the problem." At the VA, the worst offender was 110 percent more expensive than planned and 17 months behind schedule. The agency plans to audit all the projects in question to determine whether additional resources or new management teams can get them back on track. "If we didn't highlight this and make data available, we would be continuing to plow good money after bad money," Kundra explained. Putting data out there through the IT dashboard and other initiatives forces agencies to take action and drive change across government, he said.

What about slowly aging Web offerings that predated the Obama era like FedBizOpps -- a contracting portal for commercial vendors and government buyers -- or the Federal Register's Web site? "We're looking at the lessons learned in investments from these platforms and making sure we can scale them," Kundra said. His team wants to ensure that the technology that supports those services is agile enough so the content can be repurposed. Similarly, legacy data systems used internally by agencies are being reviewed. "The key is to make sure we find those game-changing ideas and disrupt how we're thinking about the linear fashion in which we go out there and invest in technology," he said.