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GCN Home > 06/21/04 issue

Inside job

Out of the many, few

By Joab Jackson, GCN Staff

The Homeland Security Department is still struggling to get a handle on the hundreds of systems that make up its back-office operations.

Last year, DHS did an inventory of all of its IT systems. In functions such as budgeting, finance, recruiting and personnel management, it found a lot of systems—and a lot of redundancy.

The inventory found more than 300 systems that could be classified as handling back-office functions, and they frequently overlapped, especially in human resources, financial management and procurement.

DHS leaders want to consolidate those systems into a service-oriented architecture in which functions needed by all agencies could be handled by enterprisewide applications.

The inventory, ordered by CIO Steve Cooper’s office, found that DHS human resources departments had only eight discrete business processes, each of which is composed of multiple subprocesses. Financial-management departments had six. Yet the systems supporting these processes numbered in the dozens.

“Within these two particular sets of business activities,” the report said, “there is an extensive amount of existing infrastructure within legacy agency organizations that could present DHS with opportunities for re-engineering and consolidation.”

Translation: DHS could slash the number of applications for these services, saving money and streamlining the infrastructure.

Along with the inventory, Cooper’s office released what it called a “Target Enterprise Architecture” to guide the alignment of the agency’s IT investments to match its mission.

Cooper plans to use the EA to delete redundant business systems, as well as those that don’t fit DHS mission objectives, and to redirect other systems—including back-office systems—into the service-oriented architecture.

Under a service-oriented architecture, one agencywide enterprise application will provide each function, such as human resources. All DHS offices would use the app, eliminating the need for each component agency to maintain its own system. Storage for the data from these applications would also be consolidated.

At least, that’s the plan.
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