Justice to gauge agencies' case management needs

The Justice Department will gather case management requirements through the summer of other agencies that conduct law enforcement.Justice is laying the foundation for the case management line of business, which it leads as part of the Office of Management and Budget’s consolidation initiative.No milestones have been put in place yet, said Paul Garrett, program manager for the line of business at Justice for three months. But he expects to begin planning milestones after his next meeting with OMB scheduled for today, he said.Under the initiative, OMB will encourage agencies to share their case management systems, or components of them. Justice’s $305 million Sentinel case management system, which it awarded earlier this year to Lockheed Martin Corp., is the centerpiece of the line of business.Garrett foresees being able to share components of Sentinel, such as system logs and reports for tracking. The Homeland Security and Treasury departments are the main agencies working with Garrett to determine how and what aspects of case management they can share, he said.“We’ve shared Sentinel documents with interested parties. Sentinel is just getting started. We have to figure out all that it’s going to do,” he said today after an industry event sponsored by the Bethesda, Md., chapter of the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association.OMB has not established hard agency objectives for the CMLOB compared with, for example, the financial management line of business, which calls for agencies to acquire financial management services from a public or private shared-services provider, he said.“Each agency defines a case differently, whereas a GL [government standard general ledger] posting in a financial system is standardized,” Garrett said.