USDA to merge e-mail, data systems

And that’s only the beginning. The agency will next target LANs and data centers for consolidation. In the meantime, the department’s overall security stature will improve because, officials say, they have no choice after receiving failing grades on the Federal Information Security Management scorecard the last five years.

Agriculture CIO David Combs and his staff have laid out an ambitious strategy to change the way the agency works.

Combs’ plan is to take the complex issues, worry and costs out of the hands of the department’s agencies and of- fices, and let them concentrate on their mission priorities.

“We are infrastructure support, and my approach is [that] we are here to provide a service, and they pay for it,” he said recently at a lunch in Washington sponsored by the Association for Federal Information Resources Management.

“Ideally, they will get efficiencies and spend less money for e-mail and desktop services.”

Agriculture spends about $2 billion annually on IT, with $1.5 billion going for systems. That includes 330 investments, of which 66 are classified as major, Combs said. And it’s in that $1.5 billion that his of- fice is trying to save money.

The CIO’s office presented USDA management with three back-office areas that could be consolidated—LAN, e-mail and data centers. E-mail was the first choice.

“We did research and found that the e-mail would give us the biggest bang for the buck for the employees,” said Cheryl McQuery, USDA’s assistant chief information officer in charge of the initiative.

McQuery said 76 percent of the employees already use Microsoft, while the other 24 percent use Lotus Notes or Novell.

USDA will use existing contracts for hardware and software, including the General Services Administration’s Federal Supply Service schedule and an enterprise software agreement with Microsoft, to complete the project, she said.

McQuery added that they do not plan to hire a systems integrator because of the skills they have in-house within the IT services center organization.

“We have some policy and design issues to work on,” she said. “We also have to figure out where we will want to host the system and how to train the users.”

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