Business systems oversight at the Defense Department continues to fall short, says the Government Accountability Office in a June 29 report.

According to data from the Deputy Chief Management Officer, the Defense Department has budgeted $23.58 billion on business systems in the current fiscal year, which ends Oct. 1. The GAO report cites a different figure, that of $17.4 billion, but also notes that DoD business system reporting mechanisms are inconsistent from one to the other.

Regardless of the exact number, the GAO report says the DoD business system environment has for some time been characterized by little standardization, multiple systems performing the same tasks, the same data stored in multiple systems and manual data entry into multiple systems.

The potential for cost savings associated with identifying and avoiding duplication among such systems is significant, the report says--but criticizes the department for not implementing key policies and procedures for business system oversight.

For example, although  program offices for large business systems such as the Army's Logistics Modernization Program and Navy ERP used a DoD "economic viability tool," program managers "did not use important cost estimating practice critical to developing such analyses," the report states.

Military departments' business enterprise architectures are also not fully developed and all services lack an architecture-driven plan to guide business transformation initiatives, the report says. The DoD has taken a federated approach to business enterprise architecture, meaning that DoD components develop autonomous architectures that incorporate certain top-down DoD-wide rules and services.

At the secretary of defense level, DoD oversight lacks sufficient visibility into the vast majority of military systems, the report adds. Only 100 business systems come under consideration by Pentagon investment review boards.

The report, despite its above-average length for a GAO report, only has one recommendation: that the office of the secretary of defense speed up an announced closure of the Business Transformation Agency and transfer of its functions to OSD offices.

DCMO Elizabeth McGrath told GAO auditors that she concurs with the recommendation.

For more:
- download the report, GAO-11-684 (.pdf)
- see an interactive visualization we've created about DoD business systems based on DCMO data

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