DOD drafting financial architecture

The Defense Department hopes to have the draft of its financial management architecture completed within three months, officials working on the project said.

The architecture is part of DOD's Herculean effort to clean up a financial mess. Auditors have said that the architecture is a critical first step toward fixing DOD's matrix of more than 1,000 financial management systems.

DOD in April awarded a contract valued at $100 million to IBM Corp. to develop the architecture.

Initial efforts have focused on DOD business practices and policies rather then on technology, said Betty Sandbeck, IBM's DOD financial management architecture project manager.

DOD has provided 76 people representing the department's business lines to advise the IBM team on the architecture's development, Sandbeck said. The DOD team will advise the development team about changes that are done as a result of legislative requirements as well as the feasibility of changes to business practices.

Once the draft of the architecture is completed, it will be implemented throughout DOD, she said.

DOD awarded the contract to IBM, but the pieces are being doled out as individual task orders under that contract. Tom Burlin, vice president of IBM Global Services' public-sector unit, said that DOD had awarded three tasks so far: one to establish the program office, one to look at DOD's "as is" environment and one to create a repository for the information that the project creates.

The initial stages of such an undertaking are critical, and Burlin said that they have gone very well.

DOD set an aggressive one-year timetable for completing the architecture, which is still feasible, Burlin said.

DOD, because of its size, is largely blamed for preventing the government from being able to balance its books.

Bill Lynn, former DOD comptroller, praised Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for making financial management a priority. While the private sector needs clean books so executives can determine if their company is making money, there are no such criteria within public-sector organizations. Instead, the focus of financial management improvements must be on the good data available to managers for decision-making, Lynn said.

Burlin and Lynn spoke at a forum at the Capitol this week sponsored by Fleishman-Hillard, a communications consulting firm.