USDA Service Centers

The effort to modernize information technology at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) field service centers, as currently planned, will be the largest, most costly, and complex in the agency's history. The goal of this initiative is to provide "one-stop" service to customers of USDA's farm service, natural resources, and rural development agencies by collocating field offices and modernizing the business processes and information technology used in these offices. USDA projects that it could ultimately spend more than $3 billion on these efforts by the year 2011. This report describes USDA's ongoing efforts to modernize information technology for its service centers and identifies the significant risks in these plans.

GAO noted that: (1) USDA's service center IT modernization effort, as currently being planned, will be the biggest, most costly, and complex in the department's history; (2) it involves projects to: (a) develop new business processes; (b) acquire and install telecommunications equipment; (c) acquire, implement, and maintain a common computing environment at about 3,100 locations; and (d) acquire and develop geospatial data; (3) USDA's life-cycle cost estimates show that the department could ultimately spend more than $3 billion for these projects by 2011; (4) the department reported spending about $145 million since starting its service center IT modernization in 1996, and plans to spend over $200 million more during fiscal years 1998 and 1999; (5) USDA's multibillion dollar undertaking faces significant risks; (6) specifically: (a) USDA continues to acquire new technology before it has reengineered business processes for providing one-stop service in all of its service centers; (b) USDA is not managing its IT-related projects for its service centers as investments, using cost, benefit, risk, and performance information to select, control, and evaluate projects throughout their life-cycle; (c) USDA has not completed a comprehensive plan identifying critical milestones, project dependencies, and resources required for the modernization; (d) in acquiring technology, USDA is not following an incremental approach that uses cost justifications and performance measures for each increment to reduce risks associated with large-scale acquisitions or projects; and (e) USDA lacks the project management structure needed to manage a modernization of this magnitude; specifically, USDA has not assigned a senior-level official with overall responsibility, authority, and accountability for managing and coordinating the separate, service center IT modernization projects and for ensuring that the Clinger-Cohen mandates have been met and that critical tasks are completed on time and within budget; (7) as a result of these risks, even after spending billions of dollars on its service center IT modernization, the department may not obtain an adequate return on its investment, meet the needs of its customers, or achieve the Secretary of Agriculture's vision of one-stop service; and (8) many of the weaknesses GAO identified are similar to those that caused USDA's earlier Info Share program, which cost more than $100 million, to fail.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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