FEMA seeks help integrating IT systems
Connecting state and local government leaders
The agency has 200-odd systems supporting state and local disaster response that don't communicate with each other.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency wants the private sector to help it coordinate disaster response in states and local communities and help it modernize its siloed, legacy IT, said one of the agency's top managers.
The problems integrating the 200-odd IT systems that FEMA uses to help state and local emergency responders, governments and private citizens, "are not unknown to leadership," Deputy Administrator Daniel Kaniewski said in an April 4 presentation on the agency's recently released strategic plan for 2018-2022. Those hundreds of systems "aren't communicating with each other," he added.While a key part of FEMA's disaster response help to state and local governments is delivered through its grants programs, the agency has 10 systems supporting those grant programs, Kaniewski said.
"We're in the middle of a multi-year effort" to solve those difficulties, he said. Part of that effort, he said is FEMA's Grant Management Modernization program.
FEMA kicked off the GMM program in 2016, to simplify and coordinate business management approaches across all of the agency's grants programs. When the program is completed, the agency expects to have a common grants lifecycle and platform for users. GMM's completion, said Kaniewski, won't be for "several" years, however.
To find help solving some of its thorny IT problems, Kaniewski said he had recently visited Silicon Valley to talk with industry. "They embraced us" when it came to talking about alternatives to using hundreds of legacy systems, he said.
Earlier this month, the inspector general at the Department of Homeland Security told FEMA Administrator Brock Long that it planned a comprehensive investigation into the agency's IT management practices because of concerns about progress and transparency. Kaniewski didn't address the IG's notice, but outlined his agency's broader mission.
This article was first posted to FCW, a sibling site to GCN.
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