Information Resources

Army Corporate Data Base Disregards Congressional and DOD Direction Gao ID: IMTEC-90-64 July 19, 1990

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Department of the Army's effort to develop a corporate database.

GAO found that: (1) eight Army information system development initiatives are pursuing the objectives of the cancelled Corporate Database Project; (2) the initiatives at the major command and installation levels primarily involve the development of standard databases; (3) the Army's management of the initiatives lacks a coordinated implementation plan and guidance; (4) the Army is not sure that the initiatives will work and will not duplicate others; (5) the Army is not sure that the initiatives will be able to exchange data useful to Army decisionmakers, because it has not fully implemented its data standardization program; (6) organizations controlling seven of the eight initiatives did not comply with economic analysis and determination requirements prior to system development; (7) the Army does not know whether the most economical approach has been selected for the seven initiatives or the cost for initiative development; and (8) the Army did not know how much had been spent on the initiatives because the organizations controlling them did not fully track costs.

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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