HSD names manager, sets timetable

NEW ORLEANS—The Homeland Security Department named David Boyd as the new project manager for Project Safecom, one of the Office of Management and Budget’s 25 e-government initiatives, sources said.Boyd works in HSD’s Science and Technology Directorate and is the former director of science and technology for the National Institute of Justice.Sources said Boyd’s relationship with state and local governments and his work on the Justice and Treasury departments’ Public Safety Wireless Network project were the main reasons OMB hired him to kick start one of the toughest e-government projects.OMB transferred Safecom, which would connect wireless first-responder systems across federal, state and local agencies, to the Federal Emergency Management Agency from Treasury, and changed project managers in the past year. In March, HSD officials moved it to the Science and Technology Directorate.Boyd replaces Susan Moore, who returned in April to the Agriculture Department, from which she was detailed to work on Safecom.HSD also is putting together a systems inventory for state and local first responders who are participating in the project to look at before buying applications. The inventory will let state and local officials make sure what they are buying is compatible with existing systems, said Rose Parkes, CIO for HSD’s Emergency Preparedness and Response Directorate.Parkes, who spoke last week at the Management of Change Conference sponsored by the Federation of Government Information Processing Councils, said some examples in the inventory include the Washington metropolitan area’s Capital Wireless Integration Network project.By June, Homeland Security will complete its IT asset inventory, Parkes said. From that inventory, the agency will have its basic as-is enterprise architecture; by August, HSD officials expect to finish the to-be architecture model. Parkes said that by September the agency will finish the preliminary road map to get to the to-be architecture.“The road map will include some basic tenets of our plan,” Parkes said. “It will include open architecture, Extensible Markup Language schemas and Web services.”HSD also has begun to develop a five-year budget plan, modeled after the Defense Department’s strategy, that will include consolidations within the department and joint business cases, Parkes said.