OMB plans info-sharing initiative

A new lines of business initiative focused on information sharing across federal, state and local intelligence, defense and homeland security communities will be announced in early 2005, said John Sindelar, the General Services Administration's deputy associate administrator for governmentwide policy.

But unlike the five existing lines of business initiatives that Office of Management and Budget officials announced in March, the information-sharing effort will not consolidate the back-end operations of the affected government entities, Sindelar said. The initiative will include information sharing with the private sector, he said.

One of the initiatives' goals will be data harmonization and uniform metatag standards, he said. Sindelar spoke today at the GCN Enterprise Architecture conference in Washington, D.C.

He said it's not just a matter of data but also who has the clearance to see the data.

The common service centers that will consolidate back-end operations for three of the existing lines of business initiatives — financial, grants management and human resources — should be operational by fiscal 2006, Sindelar said. By December, OMB officials "will make some decisions and identify agencies that are either potentially good candidates for becoming service centers or candidates for migrating to those service centers."

The financial management lines of business is the most advanced initiative, he said, because financial software already goes through a Joint Financial Management Improvement Program standardization process.