[A-List] Dept of Defense: IT tangle

["bon moun" <sherrynstan@xxxxxxx>]

Redundant Defense Department Systems Waste Millions
GAO report to Congress finds Defense has an overly complex and
error-prone IT environment.

By Eric Chabrow,  InformationWeek
July 9, 2003
URL:
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=1280007
4


The Department of Defense is wasting millions, maybe billions, of
dollars on redundant IT systems that support accounting, acquisition,
logistics, and personnel operations, the General Accounting Office says
in a report issued this week to several Congressional committees.

The department this year requested $26 billion for IT, and is spending
$18 billion to operate, maintain, and modernize 2,300 business systems.
The existing situation wasn't designed but rather evolved into an overly
complex and error-prone environment, the report says. Among GAO's
complaints: little standardization across the department, multiple
systems performing the same tasks, the same data stored in multiple
systems, and manual data entry into multiple systems.
The department's problems in each of these areas hinder the efficiency
of operations and leave it vulnerable to fraud, waste, and abuse, the
report states.

The Defense Department's IT architecture fails to adequately describe
the accounting and financial-management requirements and the logical
database model, which includes data standards and is used to guide the
creation of the physical databases where information is stored. In
addition, Defense has yet to implement an effective
investment-management process to control continuing and planned
business-system improvements, including one that meets federal
requirements for ensuring that obligations in excess of $1 million are
consistent with the architecture and the transition plan.

The department has taken a positive first step, GAO says, but much
remains to be accomplished before it will have the kind of blueprint and
associated investment controls to successfully modernize its business
operations and support systems.
Responding to the report, the department generally agreed with GAO's
assessment of its initial business enterprise architecture and
recognized that much work remains to be done. The department says its
approach for transitioning focuses on re-engineering its business
processes incrementally and then selecting business systems to implement
new methods and practices.