EPA to spend more for analytics

Environmental Protection Agency CIO Kimberly T. Nelson, speaking at a breakfast yesterday hosted by Input of Reston, Va., said the agency will invest more in IT integration to “better use environmental data to make decisions, set priorities and achieve agency goals.”The projects include:After almost two years at EPA, Nelson said, "An enterprise architecture has been one of my highest priorities. The baseline shows everything in place now. The sequencing plan shows where we will go in the future, how we will build out and how we will do the integrations."Nelson also referred to “getting to green” on the Office of Management and Budget’s scorecard citing progress toward meeting the President’s Management Agenda. On the most recent scorecard, EPA was upgraded to green for financial management but downgraded to yellow for e-government progress (see story at ).For fiscal 2004, Nelson said, 100 percent of EPA’s business cases received OMB approval. She said the agency uses managed services under a seven-year, performance-based task order to Computer Sciences Corp. under the General Services Administration’s Millennia contract, with an $860 million ceiling.Input has estimated that EPA in fiscal 2003 will spend $370 million on IT and will raise spending at a 9 percent compound annual growth rate, reaching $570 million by fiscal 2008.