Defense IRM

Management Commitment Needed to Achieve Defense Data Administration Goals Gao ID: AIMD-94-14 January 21, 1994

The Pentagon, challenged with maintaining a strong military at a time of shrinking resources, began its Corporate Information Management (CIM) initiative to help streamline operations and manage resources more efficiently. Despite two years of effort, the Defense Department (DOD) has made little progress toward achieving its corporate data administration goals. DOD functional managers have not uniformly followed the CIM model to document their business goals, methods, and performance measures--the essential first step to pinpointing the data they need to support their missions. Rather than resolving this fundamental problem, DOD personnel are pursuing data administration activities that are wasteful and ineffective and do not support the Pentagon's corporate data administration goals. Unless DOD's functional managers follow through on CIM implementation within their respective mission areas, DOD will not achieve its data administration goals.

GAO found that: (1) poor DOD data administration practices and a lack of data standards have increased costs and hindered DOD information management capabilities, information exchanges, and decisionmaking; (2) DOD has not been able to meet its corporate data administration goals or properly determine its corporate data needs because its senior functional managers have not documented their business requirements or established data requirements, and are not uniformly committed to CIM principles; (3) DOD has engaged in activities that do not promote its data administration goals and issued data standardization procedures without issuing guidance for developing, validating, integrating, and approving data standards; (4) the Defense Data Repository System (DDRS) cannot meet DOD needs and is incapable of providing required data storage capabilities; (5) DDRS has been loaded with unreliable and incompatible information about existing nonstandard data elements; and (6) DOD functional managers and Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence (ASD/C3I) need to effectively implement CIM so that DOD can meet its data administration goals.

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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