DOD develops acquisition management system

RAI-NC portal

A new central system at the Defense Department will allow officials to more easily oversee acquisitions and investments in the government's largest department, a DOD acquisition official said.

During this last budget cycle, Congress sharply criticized DOD for poor information technology investment management capabilities. Officials are not developing the Defense Acquisition Management Information Retrieval (DAMIR) capability solely to address that concern, but it will be a significant step toward allowing officials to oversee and balance departmentwide acquisition, said Robert Nemetz, principal deputy of acquisition resources and analysis in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics.

He spoke Nov. 18 at Federal Sources Inc.'s Federal Outlook: Strategy to Tactics conference in McLean, Va.

DOD services submit their acquisition needs by hand, often on a floppy disk, and each request will usually go through at least three levels before being filled, Nemetz said. DAMIR will let the acquisition organization collect requests directly from systems that the services are developing as part of their push toward netcentric warfare, he said.

The project is one of 12 that Defense Chief Information Officer John Stenbit announced last month as part of the Rapid Acquisition Incentive-Net Centricity program. Those programs exist to introduce commercial technology to DOD's transformation efforts.

DAMIR will also help officials at Acquisition, Technology and Logistics fulfill their goals to support the department's new joint-service perspective, Nemetz said.

"[DAMIR] is just in its infant stages, and it's a place where we see a lot of growth," he said.