State of Tennessee Creates Dashboard to Showcase Diversity Spend

NASHVILLE, Tenn. – The Governor’s Office of Diversity Business Enterprise (Go-DBE) recently launched internal and external dashboards to report diversity spend in an effort to ensure state government remains transparent and efficient.

Go-DBE, housed within the Department of General Services’ Central Procurement Office, was created in 2003 to coordinate the state’s efforts to facilitate greater participation by minority-owned, woman-owned, persons with disabilities, service-disabled veteran-owned, and small businesses in the state’s procurement and contracting opportunities.

Prior to the creation of the dashboards, Go-DBE employees were required to pull multiple queries across different systems to provide state agencies with an update on their spend with diversity businesses. Each agency has a diversity spend goal, which is based on past diversity spend history, current contracts, and upcoming procurements. The goal is tracked throughout the year to ensure achievement remains on track.

“Our Go-DBE team continues to perform exceptionally well as they’ve continued to surpass their record for diversity spend year after year and, on top of that, they’ve now created an innovative platform to showcase this spend data,” said Chief Procurement Officer Mike Perry. “These dashboards will be integral in allowing our team, other state agencies, and the public to access this real-time data.”

The dashboards allow agency users and the public to access real-time diversity spend data at their fingertips. Each agency has access to an agency-specific dashboard to track its goals and spend. Additionally, a public-facing dashboard, updated weekly, will allow citizens to view statewide diversity data such as historical year-over-year figures and spend by county or by category of diversity (minority-owned, women-owned, owned by persons with disabilities, service-disabled veteran-owned, and small businesses).

Data will be extracted into dashboards from the State’s diversity software, B2Gnow. The public-facing dashboard is now available on TN.gov.