Agriculture Department makes progress on IT consolidation

The Agriculture Department's information technology executives are embracing shared services initiatives and outsourcing in an attempt to save money and eliminate redundancies across the agency of 100,000-plus employees.

By participating in 22 of the 26 presidential e-government initiatives and eight of nine Office of Management and Budget "lines of business," the department is making significant contributions to shared services initiatives, the IT executives said. The lines of business projects are an OMB-led effort to consolidate and centralize federal IT systems, including those for financial management and human resources.

The Agriculture Department contributes heavily to the E-Rulemaking initiative, for instance, with all 22 of its rule-making agencies moving to the governmentwide system. In addition, all 14 grant-giving Agriculture agencies are posting on Grants.gov.

David Combs, the department's chief information officer, said Thursday efforts to break down barriers and bring together the department's 29 separate agencies and offices are driving the transformation.

"You as an [agency] should not be spending your mental time and resources worrying about e-mail systems or whether my computer is patched properly," Combs said at a luncheon hosted by the Association for Federal Information Resources Management. "We should be providing those services to those organizations."

Combs said that ultimately less money should be spent on IT services, but added that will be a "tough sell" for agencies that are used to "controlling everything within their little stovepipe." In fiscal 2006, the agency had a $1.5 billion budget for IT, up from $1.1 billion in fiscal 2002.

Gaining the trust of agencies within the department by providing service levels that are equal or better than the agency's current system is critical to making the concept work, Combs said.

Bob Suda, Agriculture's associate chief information officer for integration and operations, said the department is aligning its infrastructure to be ready for the OMB lines of business initiatives.

The department is focusing on consolidating its e-mail system, help desk services and data centers, said Cheryl McQueary, Agriculture's assistant chief information officer.

By October 2007, McQueary said, the entire department will be moved to Microsoft Outlook 2003. Currently it uses three different platforms, creating issues with e-mail exchanges within the department and with other parts of the government.

Agriculture also is reducing its total number of IT investments by moving funding from nonmajor ones to those that are more significant, according to Chris Niedermayer, associate chief information officer and e-government executive. In fiscal 2002, Agriculture had about 500 IT investments, including 32 major investments. Now the agency has just more than 300 investments, with 77 major investments.

"We have concentrated on those things that are similar across our 29 agencies and staff offices and saying, 'Why do that six times? Why can't we do that just once?' " Niedermayer said.