Military touts integration quintet

The Defense Department wants the services and its agencies to talk to five system integrators before installing back-office software.

DOD earlier this month awarded blanket purchase agreements under a General Services Administration schedule to five companies in hopes of reducing steep systems integration costs for enterprise resource planning software. The department awarded the BPAs to Accenture, BearingPoint Inc., Computer Sciences Corp., Deloitte Consulting and IBM Corp.

"Every dollar that DOD spends on ERP software, it spends $15 on services implementing them," said Jim Clausen, co-chairman of the department's Enterprise Software Initiative working group.

DOD officials want to make installation of back-office software easier, quicker, cheaper and more standardized. The department does not require services and defense agencies to use the five companies, but it highly recommends doing so, said Clausen, a DOD information technology specialist.

The Defense Department started working on the project two years ago by talking to ERP software developers and systems integrators. The Navy's Naval Inventory Control Point in Mechanicsburg, Pa., issued in January a request for quotations for the competition, he said.