Air Force on consolidation course

The Air Force is about one-third through the process of consolidating its information technology resources in the hopes of building a greater enterprise infrastructure, the service's chief information officer said May 29.

The goal is to have the process completed by fiscal 2004, said Air Force CIO John Gilligan, although the initiative has been hindered by a lack of funding necessary to buy the larger servers that are needed to replace the service's smaller ones.

The goal is to improve reliability, improve security and reduce cost, Gilligan said.

"We don't have the outages that we used to have," he said. The initiative also is freeing up a lot of people who used to do system administration work part time, enabling them to get back to being pilots and doing other, more mission-critical tasks, he said.

The Navy has undergone a much-publicized effort to consolidate hundreds of networks across its shore-based sites under its Navy Marine Corps Intranet initiative. The Air Force effort differs from NMCI because it is not a top-down approach, Gilligan said. Instead, the bases have been given a mandate, standards and architecture, but they own the task.

The current program goes through fiscal 2004 because bases have had trouble finding the money to purchase larger servers. Gilligan said the Air Force is considering a proposal that would accelerate that schedule.

The consolidation includes servers for e-mail, Web access, data and files. It is also an effort to bring together functions, such as financial and personnel data.

As part of the effort, the Air Force is also trying to reduce the number of applications the service uses, he said.

Gilligan spoke May 29 at the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association's Washington, D.C., chapter lunch.