E-gov ready for migration

2003 E-Government Strategy

With most of the 24 e-government initiatives having met the two-year goal for getting an initial solution up and running, agencies are ready for the next step: migrating to a single solution and turning off many legacy systems.

That likely will take another 16 to 18 months, said Mark Forman, administrator of the Office of E-Government and Information Technology at the Office of Management and Budget.

Turning off existing redundant systems is just as important as developing a single cross-agency solution, but "it will take until next summer to get the migrations really done," Forman said. He was speaking May 1 at the Input MarketView 2003 conference.

However, no easy migration methodology exists to draw from in either government or the private sector. Most migration strategies are for moving directly to a new system that is serving a similar function as the old one, and that is not what the e-government initiatives are doing, Forman said.

"We're migrating from those independent systems to one that is new for the users on the external and the internal side," he said.

OMB is working with agencies to develop a migration methodology for e-government, taking into account the additional variables, he said.

The Defense Department is a part of this effort, but it is dealing with it from a DOD-specific point of view, said Mark Krzysko, deputy director of electronic business.

Just last week officials announced that they would be shutting down the DOD Business Opportunities (DODBusOpps) portal over the next few months and moving to the governmentwide FedBizOpps site. However DODBusOpps fulfilled some Defense-specific needs, and the migration will continue until fiscal 2004 to make sure that those needs will still be met, Krzysko said.

DOD also has moved its Federal Technical Data Solution (FedTeDS) tool, fully over to the Integrated Acquisition Environment initiative led by the General Services Administration, Krzysko said. FedTeDS provides a way to securely exchange sensitive acquisition information. It was such an effective solution that it simply made sense to make it the governmentwide solution, he said.