In 2010 GSA announced it would migrate its Lotus Notes email system to a cloud solution provided by Unisys Corporation, estimating it would save $15 million over five years but GSA’s inspector general has issued a report saying that some aspects of the projected savings cannot be verified, raising broader questions about the government’s cloud-first policy.
It said the Office of the CIO has not updated the cost analysis or maintained supporting documentation, and that it cannot fully assess whether the transition project is accomplishing its goals because the performance measures are unclear, lack targets or were not updated.
It also found that the Office of the CIO did not perform an enterprise-wide assessment for redundancies of the applications migrating to the cloud.
According to the IG, GSA management agreed to prepare an updated analysis / justification regarding the email and collaboration tools, project savings using actual figures and maintain updated savings documentation.
It said management also agreed to implement a comprehensive performance measurement program to monitor the progress of the email and collaboration tools transition project as well as to assess the current cloud environment to identify duplicate applications and consolidate them if need be.
