Defense ADP

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO evaluated the Department of Defense's (DOD) implementation of its Corporate Information Management (CIM) initiative, designed to improve DOD business practices, make better use of information technology, and eliminate duplicate information systems.

GAO found that: (1) to encourage the military services to identify and cut duplicative system developments and to reflect CIM savings, DOD reduced fiscal years (FY) 1991 through 1995 information technology budgets by $2.2 billion; (2) to provide overall CIM guidance and vision, DOD established an executive level group of industry and senior defense experts as a network for interservice oversight and functional work groups to implement CIM; (3) the functional work groups encountered difficulties, since they lacked enough expertise to prepare detailed strategies for moving to standard systems; (4) DOD changed its internal organization to implement CIM and to streamline and expedite the CIM process and was also considering selecting existing service systems to use as interim systems until it decided how to best implement CIM standard systems; and (5) to effectively implement CIM, DOD will need to develop an overall strategy with both long-term and short-term objectives and milestones that will allow it to achieve each CIM goal.