Building the Enterprise - Booz Allen Hamilton

agencies. Such enterprise IT servicescould be supported by a multiyearfunding mechanism to ensurethat agency customers have a voiceand a choice in the services and providersavailable.The advantages of an enterpriseIT approach are especially apparentwhen it comes to data centersand the cloud. Faced with a proliferationof underutilized agency datacenters, the administration in 2010announced a Federal Data CenterConsolidation Initiative calling forclosure of 1,200, or 40 percent, ofthe federal government’s 3,133 datacenters by the end of 2015. The initiativedirected agencies to increaseutilization to 60 percent in the centersthat remain. By the end of fiscal2012, 500 centers had been closed.Even more savings and efficienciescould be achieved by consolidatingdata center capacity and increasingutilization across the federal enterprise,not just within agencies.An enterprise approach to cloudcomputing also can yield comparableefficiencies. In 2010, the WhiteHouse required agencies to adopt acloud-first policy when consideringnew information technology acquisitions.It required agencies to moveIT data storage and applicationsfrom their local servers to networksof remote servers hosted on the Internet,known as cloud computing.But as with data centers, the focushas involved individual agenciesmoving information to the cloudrather than multiple agencies sharingthe same cloud computing resources.The enterprise potential ofcloud computing is significant.For example, the 17 agenciesof the intelligence community areconsidering ways to break their ITsilos and operate a single, ultra-securecloud for the entire community,with CIA and the National SecurityAgency (NSA) as central providers.The National Geospatial—IntelligenceAgency and the Defense IntelligenceAgency are expected to providedesktop services, while the NSAis expected to be a central repositoryfor computing applications. Thisinteragency initiative, if embracedby the community, could reduce ITspending through elimination of redundantacquisition, operations andmaintenance costs.Under the central coordinationof the Office of the Director of NationalIntelligence, the intelligencecommunity also deployed a common,classified email system across17 agencies and six Cabinet departments.Similar interagency enterpriseapproaches are not just possible,but imperative, for many if notmost common IT services.We applaud and support administrationinitiatives so far toconsolidate IT within agencies. Butthese initiatives need coherenceand greater emphasis to expand toan interagency approach. With theright platform, management structureand funding, the services andfunctions included in the administration’sefforts be could be providedacross agencies. •STRATEGY 7TAKE SHARED SERVICES TO SCALE“The original promise of sharedservices providers has notbeen met … Now it is timeto realize that promise.”While an enterprise approach to ITservices is a positive step in and ofitself, it has the added advantage ofproviding the interagency IT infrastructureto support shared personnel,financial management and othermission-support services. Thisenables the expansion of sharedservices from purely back-officetransaction processing to more sophisticatedservices. In so doing, thefederal government could finally realizethe full potential of the Bushadministration’s functional Linesof Business (LoB) initiative, underwhich federal organizations provideadministrative services for a fee toother agencies.The first sets of LoBs were establishedby OMB in 2004, focusingon business systems common to allagencies, such as payroll, personnelaction processing and basic accounting.OMB required agenciesto conduct a cost-benefit analysis oftheir various support functions. If itshowed that outsourcing a supportfunction to one of the interagencyshared services providers was costeffective,then the agency was ex-18 PARTNERSHIP FOR PUBLIC SERVICE | BOOZ ALLEN HAMILTON