HHS becomes more enterprising

New leadership at the Department of Health and Human Services, the need to secure systems and the reality of tight budgets are breathing new life into plans to create enterprise systems that can work across the agency.

HHS traditionally has had a distributed culture, but Brian Burns, HHS deputy chief information officer, said the concerns about security and budgets are driving organizations toward centralized systems.

A few HHS organizations are still reluctant to accept the concept of enterprise systems, Burns said. "There are a couple of outliers out there," he said, but most of the organization has come around to the concept.

As organizations struggle with security requirements and determine how they are going to spend their information technology dollars, they are reassessing their view of enterprise systems.

"In order for us to continue to supply equal or better service with equal or even less staff, we have to automate and consolidate," Burns said last week following a presentation at Federal Sources Inc.'s annual Outlook conference.

The agency's new leadership, including HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson, has made the issue more of a priority. "The new secretary is very interested in saving money in IT," Burns said. Therefore, there is an interest in having enterprise systems instead of individual, parochial systems. "There is management support at the very top."

Security is also spurring more enterprise developments, Burns said. The department has about 3,100 individual servers and 2,000 Web sites with about 8 million Web pages. "We need to do some consolidation there and streamline that approach," he said.

"If we streamline, we can reduce the vulnerabilities that we have out there" and do a more effective job of managing those vulnerabilities, he said.

HHS has tried to use successful pilots to generate support for enterprise systems. HHS let operating divisions decide their critical areas, develop a system, and let the functionality and success of those systems attract uses, Burns said.

"Nobody is going to believe when you say that you have a better mouse trap. If they see you're doing it, then they are more likely to buy in," he said.