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Friday, 29.03.2024
eGovernment Forschung seit 2001 | eGovernment Research since 2001
Despite years of modernization efforts that have cost taxpayers billions of dollars, thousands of IT systems at the Pentagon remain "fundamentally flawed" and have led to logistics and pay problems for forces serving in Iraq, according to a new report by the U.S. General Accounting Office.

The problems, primarily a lack of management oversight and investment control, stem from "long-standing" challenges to the Pentagon's business modernization efforts, GAO auditors told members of Congress last week. For example, more than 200 inventory control systems at the Department of Defense still aren't integrated, offering little or no visibility into the Pentagon's $1.1 trillion in assets, according to the GAO. In addition, the Pentagon has no standard process for identifying critical business systems, nor does it even have a standard definition of what constitutes a business system.

"These problems have left the department vulnerable to billions of dollars of fraud, waste and abuse annually, at a time of increasing fiscal constraint," GAO auditors told Congress.

The Defense Department's IT management blunders have also adversely affected U.S. military units and service members, including those fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, according to the GAO.

The lack of IT management at the Pentagon has caused military personnel to experience "substantial logistical support problems" in Iraq, the GAO concluded.

In a written response to the GAO's findings, David Norquist, acting comptroller at the Pentagon, cited the continuing development of a business enterprise architecture and a business IT investment governance structure that he said should begin to reap benefits during the fiscal 2006 budget cycle.

John Gilligan, CIO of the Air Force, said the GAO report tells only part of the story. According to Gilligan, the $19 billion that the DOD requested for modernizing its business systems, as cited in the GAO report, also covered infrastructure costs such as classified and unclassified networks and computing centers in both U.S. and overseas locations.

Gilligan said the branches of the military have made substantial progress in consolidating and modernizing their business systems, "on a scale larger than all but a few of the Fortune 500 companies."

Karen Evans, the White House's director of e-government, said the DOD's leadership "supports the president's management agenda and is committed to transforming the department's business operations."

Autor: Dan Verton

Quelle: ComputerWorld , 12.07.2004

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