Army buys $5M of tracking software

The Army awarded ProSight a $5 million contract last month for software and services, the largest order to date under the General Services Administration's SmartBuy program.

The Army Small Computer Program purchased 5,000 licenses of ProSight Portfolios and ProSight Fast Track solutions April 21 to help implement portfolio management servicewide. Army Chief Information Officer Lt. Gen. Steve Boutelle said he believes the products will help better track the service’s 4,500 systems and better spend its annual IT budget with $6.1 billion requested for fiscal 2006.

"This tool will assist us in our implementation of a standard portfolio management solution across the Army, becoming our system of record for IT investments and systems," Boutelle said. "It also adds an analytical capability as we identify inefficient or redundant IT systems or investments."

The products will help stop service commands from repeatedly creating solutions to the same IT needs, Boutelle said in an April 19 memo to Army leaders.

Army officials will issue another memo next month detailing the implementation and training strategy for the initiative. They expect worldwide implementation, training, and deployment will take 12 to 18 months.

The service has an enterprise strategy that groups IT investments into domains and portfolios and assigns people to manage them. The service is working on a memorandum to establish mission area and domain leads in response to the Defense Department’s IT portfolio strategy, Boutelle said.

Tired of generals not taking responsibility for their systems, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker told Boutelle in March to devise a plan that improves the management and interoperability of the service’s systems. A problem with a logistics system in Iraq caused the Army’s top officer to address technology issues.

Boutelle said the Army at that time was actively pursuing a contract portfolio management decision support tool. "The ProSight [deal] was already in the works," he said.