The Immigration and Naturalization Service needs to do a better job of describing its future information technology needs and how they relate to the agency's business operations, according to a new General Accounting Office report.
GAO's main beef is that the Office of Information Resource Management at INS is the only entity working on the agency's "enterprise architecture."
"INS's architectural development efforts are not being managed as a formal program," GAO concluded in its report, "Information Technology: INS Needs to Better Manage the Development of Its Enterprise Architecture" (AIMD-00-212).
In fact, without standard management controls, GAO said "it is unlikely INS will produce a complete and useful enterprise architecture."
Creation of such an architecture is required by Congress and the Office of Management and Budget.
"Because an enterprise architecture, by definition, is a corporate representation in both business and technical terms of how the organization operates today and in the future, it must be approached as an enterprise endeavor with senior executive management sponsorship," GAO said.
GAO found that while the INS has made reasonable steps toward creating a description of its current IT infrastructure, the agency has not begun developing the plans for its architecture of the future. In fact, the only work INS has done with an eye toward the future is identifying system problems it needs to fix over the next two years.
GAO recommended that the INS's Investment Review Board be given the responsibility of overseeing the development of an enterprise architecture. While INS agreed with most of the findings of the report, the agency disagreed on this point.
In a letter to GAO, Mary Ann Wyrsch, INS deputy commissioner, said agency officials did not believe the IRB was best-suited for the job and were looking for ways of managing and funding the enterprise architecture project.
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