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GCN Home > 05/01/06 issue

Bottom-line results

Snow shakes up financial systems at the Coast Guard

By Sami Lais, Special to GCN

“‘You’re not going to just lie around my house, so you better figure out what you’re going to do and do it.’

“When my father—he was career Army—talks to you like that, you get up and get moving,” said Avie Snow, chief of financial systems at Coast Guard headquarters in Washington.

And since that lazy summer afternoon after graduating from Rutgers University, Snow has not stopped moving.

Even sitting behind her desk in a cramped office overflowing with books, papers, files and a rock that says “Breathe,” she is in motion, fixing you with her gaze while she makes you understand that it is her team that is responsible for her success, throwing back her head and laughing as she tells a self-deprecating story or leaning back in her chair and searching the ceiling for a way to say someone screwed up while also taking personal responsibility for the screw-up.

Nine-month build

She, and her team, really had to move after 9/11 when the Coast Guard was reassigned from the Transportation Department to the Homeland Security Department and had to migrate off DOT’s accounting system. In nine months, they built the Core Accounting System (CAS) for about $7 million.

The first pieces of the integrated suite were the core accounting system, Oracle Corp.’s Oracle Federal Financials, Finance and Procurement Desktop (FPD) for simplified acquisition, funds management and field accounting, followed by the Contract Information Management System for contract writing.

The CAS suite is built on a services-oriented architecture, open standards and software including FPD; Oracle Federal Financials for federal accounting and reporting; San Ramon, Calif.-based Sunflower Systems Inc.’s Sunflower Assets for property management; Prism-Procurement from Compusearch Software Systems Inc. of Dulles, Va.; and Markview workflow and invoice imaging software from 170 Systems Inc. of Bedford, Mass.

Rather than proprietary Web brokers or middleware to integrate applications, CAS uses open-standard Web services, which let disparate applications integrate in real time.

“Many in the technology sector still consider a services-oriented architecture and integration using Web services to be a technology vision,” said Ray Muslimani, president of Coast Guard integrator Global Computer Enterprises Inc. of Reston, Va. Snow shrugs off the praise. “At the time, there was $10 billion invested throughout the industry in SOA,” she said. “And this in the private sector, where profit is the bottom line. I could guess things were going that way.”

The success of the project, she said, was due to her “amazing team,” and “our CFO, who let me do stuff.”

More news on related topics: Business Process Management, Homeland Security, Management, IT Management



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