OMB will spend $500,000 on the next wave of e-gov

The Office of Management and Budget will allocate $500,000 of its $5 million e-government fund to hire a contractor to assess cross-agency collaboration and consolidation in six government lines of business: financial management, human resources, data and statistical development, public health information, criminal investigations and public-health monitoring.Mark Forman, administrator of OMB’s Office of E-Government and IT, yesterday said his office will issue a task order through the General Services Administration’s Management, Organizational and Business Improvement Services schedule contract.On April 21, OMB notified the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Treasury, Postal Service and General Government that it will spend the money, a subcommittee staff member said. Congress has appropriated the funds for OMB, which does not need subcommittee approval but does have to notify the lawmakers. OMB’s letter said the assessment analyses are “targeted for completion this fiscal quarter”—by the end of next month. Initial business case results are scheduled for the end of September, the letter said.Forman, speaking at a 2003 market view conference sponsored by Input of Reston Va., said the new projects will start down the road to consolidation just as many of the original 25 Quicksilver initiatives are winding down.“By the beginning of next summer, many of the projects will be finishing their migration to a joint solution,” he said. “We expect in the next 15 to 18 months, we will be finished with many of the [25] projects.”The biggest obstacle to migrating projects from many systems to one common system, Forman said, has been developing migration plans. He said agencies and OMB have had to come up with their own methodologies.He also said the Federal Information Security Management Act report is in the final stages of review. Agency comments were due yesterday. The release date of the report will be tied to the number of needed changes based on agency comments.