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IT Reform at the Department of Justice
Posted by Vance Hitch, CIO
Both the DOJ and our components have accomplished a great deal since I started as the Chief Information Officer in 2002. The 25 Point Implementation Plan to Reform Federal IT Management has been significant in reforming the Federal IT portfolio. The success at Justice has been due to execution in my staff and in the bureaus’ staff across DOJ. We have accomplished a great deal over the last six months and are in the process of incorporating these reforms into our organization, policies and practices. The 25 Point Plan’s emphasis on cloud computing, data center consolidation, improving IT management and budgeting, and other priorities has challenged our organizations to change the way we think about Federal IT. We continue to innovate and improve what we do by including the 25 Point Plan as part of our Department’s overall strategy for delivering better IT services to our employees, partners, and the public.
The DOJ is committed to safe and secure cloud adoption because we understand the increasing benefits of being able to provide services to our employees and the public in a more agile manner. Over the next year, Justice will move three services to the cloud: our IT Capital Planning Software, email services at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), and more electronic storage for US Attorneys offices. Justice will also see two data centers close this year, which will improve the overall efficiency of our data centers; we are also planning for significant improvement in server utilization across the Department.
Justice’s use of a managed service model for telecommunications resulted in significant cost benefits and efficiencies for the Department. We’ve shared this managed service model in a case study showing how agencies can improve purchasing power by aggregating separate expenditures. The case study is currently available at www.cio.gov/bestpractices. The Sentinel case management system at FBI has a long history of program challenges. Now, after the agency-led TechStat here at Justice, the investment has implemented a more incremental and agile development approach. Sentinel is scheduled to deliver useful functionality in July and September of this year, in addition to a release that occurred in April. This is an encouraging first step toward our overall goal of turning around or terminating a third of our underperforming projects by June of next year.
As CIO of the Department of Justice, and co-chair of the Information Security and Identity Management Committee (ISIMC), I am proud of DOJ’s accomplishments in cyber-security. We have implemented Department-wide capabilities for enterprise-wide vulnerability scanning, patch management, and network security through our Justice Security Operations Center (JSOC). In the next year, we will continue to expand our JSOC capabilities and toolsets. Likewise, DOJ has been a leader in information sharing. We have worked closely with federal and state/local/tribal law enforcement agencies to implement information sharing standards such as the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) and have stood up a nation-wide Law Enforcement National Data Exchange (N-DEx). In the next 12 months we plan to continue the expansion of the N-DEx among state/local/tribal law enforcement agencies and support the efforts of the Program Manager for Information Sharing Environment (PM-ISE) to share information to prevent terrorism. As part of our efforts to prevent terrorism, DOJ also continues to expand the successful sharing of suspicious activity reports (SARs) among state/local/tribal, federal government agencies, and other partners.
Vance Hitch is the Chief Information Officer at the Department of Justice.
