The Defense Department’s business systems modernization program, which has been on GAO’s high-risk list since 1995, not only remains there but progress on improvements has slowed of late, GAO has reported.
The fiscal 2005 DoD authorization bill set out a series of steps the department is to take and required a series of reviews by GAO and others, and in the most recent assessment, GAO said much is still to be accomplished in fulfilling the law’s directives. The latest version of DOD’s business enterprise architecture (BEA) and transition plan does address some previously identified missing elements, inconsistencies, and usability issues, but gaps still remain, said GAO report GAO-09-586.
GAO said that while the BEA now identifies information assurance laws, regulations, and policies, "it still does not include business rules for all business processes. Further, little progress has been made in the last year in extending (i.e., federating) the BEA to the entire family of business mission area architectures, including using an independent verification and validation agent to assess the components’ subsidiary architectures and federation efforts.
Similarly, the updated enterprise transition plan continues to identify systems and initiatives, but important elements are still missing, as are individual component plans, it said. For example, while the plan provides a range of information, such as budgets and performance measures, for key enterprisewide and component-specific investments, it is missing information on identified investments.
"The fiscal year 2009 budget submission included some, but omitted other, key information about business system investments, in part because of the lack of a reliable comprehensive inventory of all defense business systems," GAO added.
