Forest Service Not Ready to Acquire a Nationwide Geographic Information System

Gao ID: T-IMTEC-90-10 May 2, 1990

GAO discussed the Forest Service's plans to acquire a nationwide geographic information system (GIS). GAO found that: (1) the nationwide system would be composed of commercially available GIS software linked by an existing telecommunications network; (2) the Service estimated that GIS would cost $1.2 billion over a 12-year period, of which about $900 million was for management and overhead costs; (3) the Service was not ready to procure a $1.2-billion nationwide system; (4) the Service did not analyze a full range of alternatives, made assumptions that unnecessarily limited the alternatives it considered, and did not analyze how those alternatives would affect its organization; (5) the Service did not estimate the dollar value of specific benefits it expected to achieve from GIS, but instead used an invalid representation of future benefits; (6) the Service did not adequately define its information and system performance needs, thereby failing to comply with regulations governing functional requirements for systems; and (7) there was an increased and unnecessary risk that GIS would not result in a cost-effective system.



The Justia Government Accountability Office site republishes public reports retrieved from the U.S. GAO These reports should not be considered official, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Justia.