BREAKING NEWS

The scalable storage clusters will integrate Box Hill’s RAID Box 5300 Turbo+
storage arrays and Magna Box 100 Digital Linear Tape media changers with Legato NetWorker
enterprise backup software from Legato Systems Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif.

The bureau will use the high-speed, automated capture systems to scan and read census
short forms. The project contractor, Lockheed Martin Corp., will build the clusters to
handle daily peak loads of 82,077 forms, Box Hill officials said.

Contact Box Hill at 212-989-4455.

The Information Technology Resources Board has issued a self-assessment tool to help
agencies improve management of information technology projects.

The document, Managing Information Systems: A Practical Assessment Tool, contains
questions agency officials can ask to determine a project’s potential success.

ITRB, an interagency workgroup the Clinton administration created to provide peer
assessments of mission-critical information systems, learned extensive lessons from its
reviews, said ITRB chairman Arnold Bresnick, associate chief information officer for the
Agriculture Department. The 17-member group found its members asked the same questions
whenever they started a review, he said.

The 27-page document has questions on nine areas in three subjects: strategy,
leadership and technology. It is available on ITRB’s Web site at www.itrb.gov.

Electronic Data Systems Corp. and NCR Corp. have teamed to build scalable data
warehouses for decision support, taking a profit only if an agency saves money by
consolidating data sources.

“The risk and reward will be shared,” said William B. Dodds, service manager
for EDS’ business intelligence services group in Plano, Texas. “We prefer to
work with NCR servers running the Teradata parallel database management system,” he
said, but the company will do whatever makes sense if an agency’s existing equipment
can handle the load.

In such an arrangement, EDS would be the single point of contact for management and
maintenance of existing systems that house enterprise data.

Contact EDS business intelligence services at 972-605-0562.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has taken the first step to create an
electronic map distribution system at its Map Service Center outside Baltimore.

FEMA in November awarded a five-year, $20 million contract to Zimmerman Associates Inc.
of Vienna, Va., to run the center. The vendor will manage and maintain the center’s
information and map distribution services, Zimmerman spokeswoman Suzanne Swenson said.

The contract also requires Zimmerman to recommend a technology that will let FEMA
distribute maps electronically. The agency believes electronic printing technologies can
reduce storage and retrieval costs, improve customer service and provide rapid delivery of
maps, Swenson said.

The contract has a one-year base with four one-year options. Zimmerman’s
subcontractors are Michael Baker Jr. Inc. of Alexandria, Va., and Kathpal Technologies
Inc. of Dunn Loring, Va.

The Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command has picked Science Applications
International Corp. of San Diego for wide-ranging systems work under SPAWAR’s chief
engineer.

The General Services Administration’s Federal Systems Integration and Management
Center helped SPAWAR design the three-year, $197 million engineering and integration task
order in less than 11 weeks.

SPAWAR develops systems for command, control, communications, computers, intelligence,
surveillance and reconnaissance on the Navy’s ships, submarines and bases. The task
order calls for systems architecture, design and engineering; preinstallation and on-site
testing; integration; engineering and acquisition management; and lifecycle support.

The Future I/O Alliance, an industry consortium, will develop specifications for future
input/output products, such as a high-speed point-to-point, switched-fabric interconnect.

Alliance members include Adaptec Inc. of Milpitas, Calif., Compaq Computer Corp.,
Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM Corp. and 3Com Corp. of Santa Clara, Calif. They aim to publish a
single interprocessor specification for communications in parallel application clusters
and for SCSI, Fibre Channel and Gigabit Ethernet I/O for servers.

The San Jose, Calif., consortium wants the interconnect spec to exceed PCIx performance
without raising prices above those of current PCI products. The 64-bit PCIx bus spec,
introduced last year by Compaq, IBM and HP, permits 133-MHz bus rates and
1,066-megabyte/sec throughput.

The Postal Service has signed a licensing agreement with OAG Worldwide to give USPS
travelers access to online information on domestic and international travel.

The Oak Brook, Ill., company’s Official Traveler Travel Information System is an
online library application. The USPS version, which users will access via the
service’s intranet, has details on all General Services Administration contract
flights, government discount hotels, worldwide government per diem rates and destination
cities.

“We felt that the product was going to be hit so much on the Internet that we
wanted to put it onto our own intranet to avoid the traffic,” said Robert Gardner,
manager of the Postal Service corporate library. “Also, since we had between 200 and
250 individual subscribers to OAG in the past and were spending about $200,000 annually,
we thought this would be a better option.”

The Postal Service OAG contract is worth $132,000. The program’s information will
be updated monthly.

The leader of the Chief Information Officers Council group that created the
governmentwide information technology architecture stepped down at the end of February.

Michael Tiemann, information architect for the Energy Department’s Office of
Information Management and chairman of the 80-member Federal Agencies Information
Architecture Working Group, said last month that Energy needs his full-time focus.

“I believe in what this group is doing and has done,” Tiemann said in a
letter to the CIO Council’s Interoperability Committee, which oversees work on the IT
architecture.

Tiemann helped get the architecture approved by the CIO Council last September. In his
resignation letter, he said there is much work yet to do. The council has not named a
replacement.

—Florence Olsen, Christopher J. Dorobek, Susan M. Menke, Frank Tiboni, William
Jackson, and Jonathan Ewing.