Transportation wants to share more services with FAA

The Transportation Department has begun talks with the Federal Aviation Administration to work together on server virtualization.With its move to new headquarters, Transportation has moved its 700 servers to a facility in Frederick, Md. FAA has a major information technology facility at its Mike Monroney Aeronautical Center in Oklahoma City.Transportation hopes to forge a formal agreement by the end of the current administration, said Dan Mintz, Transportation’s chief information officer. It is part of efforts to establish an enterprise view in a department whose IT authority is decentralized across its component agencies, and to reduce costs.For example, DOT and FAA possibly could use each other as backup for continuity of operations instead of having individual COOP sites.DOT and FAA recently agreed to have FAA provide IT security for the department. Negotiations to accomplish that took four years, Mintz said.“We have a prototype for it now. We now have something in place that we can use as a model,” he said today at an industry event that Input sponsored.Server virtualization, however, is a different situation because DOT and FAA would be working together but not merging services.DOT would like to do more virtualization with FAA in the future, such as moving some applications from Frederick to Oklahoma City.“If we can do that, we’ve broken geography in a fundamental way,” Mintz said.The CIO said he has made as priorities using shared services and developing enterprise project management processes that are repeatable and measurable.