The Department of Commerce is launching its single-view IT spending and cloud dashboard within the next two weeks, Andi Fisher-Colwill, director of business and administrative services at Commerce, announced Wednesday.
Fisher-Colwill, who also serves as acting deputy chief information officer for policy and business management at Commerce, announced the upcoming dashboard launch at the 2026 Apptio Public Sector Summit in Washington. In addition to aggregating IT and cloud spending information, Fisher-Colwill said the dashboard will use a normalized technology business management (TBM) taxonomy and display benchmark categories such as end-user support and network cost.
While some Commerce components already have a similar dashboard in place, Fisher-Colwill said this will be the first time Commerce has a department-wide view to compare metrics across bureaus and expose inconsistencies and tagging problems.
“Don’t expect every single stakeholder, every single user across a large, diverse organization, to be at the same level of maturity,” Fisher-Colwill said. “Is the Bureau of Industry and Security’s data going to be the same as the National Institute of Standards and Technologies data? … No, it’s not, but we’re going to have a common language to compare … and that’s going to allow us to start to improve across the board and get everybody up to that same level.”
The new dashboard marks a new phase of Commerce’s IT transparency initiative, Fisher-Colwill said. After five years building common taxonomies and aligning spending data, she said real progress comes when organizations start making decisions from the data itself.
“The data you have is the data you have. Make the best choice you can and then clean it up in the next iteration,” she said.
Commerce is also approaching a department-wide technical risk profile that will enable it to understand the risks of its investments. That profile is paired with an investment prioritization framework Commerce has been working on over the past year, she added. The framework ranks IT investments across bureaus based on mission alignment, spending data, and benchmarked technology costs.
While the effort is intended to move the department away from traditional bureau-by-bureau budgeting and toward portfolio-wide decisions that direct funding to Commerce’s highest priorities, she acknowledged that shift requires significant coordination with leadership, the Office of Management and Budget, and Congress.
“But we are really close to making that happen for us,” Fisher-Colwill said.
The risk profile and investment framework will support Commerce’s overall modernization priority list, which hasn’t been updated in more than a decade, Fisher-Colwill explained.
“You can imagine how much the technology landscape has changed in the intervening decade, and now we’re going to be able to capture some of that and build a plan going forward that aligns to our mission outcomes,” Fisher-Colwill said.
At the U.S. Census Bureau, a Commerce component, Megan McNeely, acting manager of the Census Bureau’s FinOps and Cloud Coordination program, said program teams are increasingly being encouraged to build a stronger culture of financial and operational planning around IT modernization efforts. She said this includes aligning development schedules, cloud migrations, and contract timelines with broader government budget realities.
“We want our development teams and our program areas to be thinking about … ‘how do we still get the job done in the time that we know we can be successful?’” McNeely said.
McNeely also said agencies are learning to manage IT funding more collaboratively across programs instead of treating systems and budgets as isolated silos. She described cases where program teams pooled leftover funding to purchase shared cloud tools or capabilities that could support multiple systems at once.
“And so they’re almost ganging up on us at our own kind of … money game, because now there’s not as much money left over … because we’re actually getting our real work done and we’re being smart about how we’re managing it,” McNeely said.