Land Management Systems

This report discusses the Bureau of Land Management's (BLM) efforts to complete the Automated Land and Mineral Record System/Modernization, a project intended to improve BLM's ability to record, maintain, and retrieve land description, ownership, and use information. At an estimated cost of $594 million, it is the largest system development project that BLM has ever undertaken. In a March 1997 report (GAO/AIMD-97-42), GAO found that BLM had encountered problems that increased the risk of degraded system performance and capability. GAO also reported significant management and technical risks and made recommendations to BLM to reduce them and strengthen project management. This report assesses BLM's actions to address the recommendations in GAO's March 1997 report and identifies the status of BLM's efforts to test, deploy, and implement the Automated Land and Mineral Record System's initial operating capability.

GAO noted that: (1) BLM has not yet fully implemented GAO's recommendations to mitigate risks and help ensure a successful transition and operating environment for ALMRS; (2) specifically, BLM does not have a security architecture and sound security plan, complete transition plans, and complete operations and maintenance plans for ALMRS; (3) BLM has developed a draft configuration management plan and has been implementing a configuration management program; (4) however, BLM has not developed a credible project schedule; (5) these tools are essential to manage the remainder of the project, help ensure system availability and performance, and avoid security and operational problems; (6) during beta testing of the ALMRS initial operating capability and validation testing of converted data, BLM identified computer workstation configuration and software problems; (7) the testing also surfaced operation concerns that had not been adequately addressed, such as how ALMRS will support public information needs and data exchanges between BLM and other organizations; (8) BLM is revising its project plan and schedule to address these problems before entering the final testing and certification phase; (9) BLM may not be able to maintain the modified schedule, however, because it: (a) is being developed without analyzing human resource usage and task relationships for predevelopment activities; and (b) contains optimistic timeframes for completing activities, leaving little time to deal with unanticipated problems that are likely to arise; (10) recent and potential future delays in implementing ALMRS place BLM at risk that existing systems supporting mission-critical business processes, which are to be replaced by ALMRS, will be subject to the year 2000 computer problem; and (11) while BLM is planning to provide the upgrades necessary to allow for the continued use of these systems if ALMRS is not fully deployed by the year 2000, it has not yet completed the requisite assessment to determine how to do this.

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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