In an effort to maximize the $90 billion the federal government is expected to spend on IT in fiscal 2017, the Government Accountability Office has recommended multiple agencies take actions to address identified weaknesses in their processes for rationalizing application inventories.
Twenty federal agencies need to streamline their portfolio of software applications to improve efficiency, reduce complexity and redundancy, and lower cost, according to a GAO study released Sept. 29.
Surveying the 24 agencies included in the Chief Financial Officers (CFO) Act of 1990, the GAO found that only the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Justice and the General Services Administration meet all best practices for application inventory rationalization. Thanks to a January Office of Management and Budget requirement to audit IT assets by the end of May 2016, nine agencies met three practices, six met two and two met one, while three met none.
To achieve GAO app inventory objectives, an agency must include business and enterprise IT systems as defined by OMB; include these systems from all organizational components; specify application name, description, owner and function supported; and be regularly updated.
A closer look at six agencies — the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Interior, Labor, NASA and the National Science Foundation — determined current investment management practices don’t account for all applications and therefore can’t secure them all, which is inconsistent with the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act passed in 2014.
GAO recommends that the agencies not meeting all key practices should improve their processes for achieving increased visibility into all IT resources and then review their inventories.
The full report can be viewed on GAO’s website.
