Federal execs honor their own for systems successes
WILLIAMSBURG, Va.'An FBI information technology executive and a Defense Department program for establishing enterprise-wide software agreements received honors last week at the 38th annual Interagency Resources Management Conference.
By Christopher J. Dorobek
GCN Staff
WILLIAMSBURG, Va.'An FBI information technology executive and a Defense Department program for establishing enterprise-wide software agreements received honors last week at the 38th annual Interagency Resources Management Conference.
Douglas Domin, deputy assistant director of the FBI's Justice Information Services Division, received the IRMCO 1999 award for individual achievement for leading a team that deployed three major systems: the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, the National Crime Information Center 2000 and the National Instant Criminal Background Check System.
The task was particularly daunting because each of the systems runs on a separate platform, uses different telecommunications networks and processes transactions across a diverse range of databases, said Treasury Department chief information officer James Flyzik. He presented the award during the opening night of the conference, which was sponsored by the CIO Council and the General Services Administration.
Domin's vision of implementing three major, highly visible systems in parallel in a short time instead of rolling them out serially, each with its own prolonged testing period, was without precedent within the FBI, said Flyzik, vice chairman of the CIO Council.
"He introduced the concept of looking at them as a system of systems, and established a 500-person, cross-organizational team to deploy them," Flyzik said.
Come together
Domin revised the IAFIS schedule and development strategy into six segments, and consolidated work by three contractors into a single systems integration contract, Flyzik said. The revamp let the FBI deploy the first two segments of the program two to three years ahead of schedule, with the remaining four segments on schedule.
Domin's management of the programs let the FBI eliminate a backlog of 1.4 million fingerprint submissions within a year, Flyzik said.
Domin ducked the praise and said he was representing a team of bureau employees. "We will leave a legacy for a lot of people to be proud of, not just me," he said.
The IRMCO 1999 award for team achievement was given to the Defense Department's Enterprise Software Initiative Working Group and Acquisition Volunteer Team.
The ESI team is a joint services group of Defense officials that has the power to develop software needs and negotiate enterprise software licenses for use departmentwide.
"Working together with little formal direction and guidance, this group has been able to complete three DOD-wide software agreements within one year, with 10 additional [software agreements] in the works," Flyzik said.
The ESI team developed an enterprisewide commercial software licensing model, he said.
The team completed a blanket purchasing agreement with Oracle Corp. for database software. The agreement resulted in a 63 percent discount from General Services Administration schedule prices on a $9.8 million multiyear order.
Furthermore, by taking advantage of DOD's Working Capital Fund, the group saved another $2.5 million over the three-year lease, Flyzik said.
The group was able to use the Working Capital Fund for another BPA for an enterprise software agreement with Informix Corp. for database products. The agreement with the Menlo Park, Calif., company let DOD deploy the products to an unlimited number of users during the first year of the pact for $290 per PC, saving 98 percent, Flyzik said.
Rex Bolton, chairman of the EIS Steering Committee, said, "We've got a lot more agreements to do."
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