An information technology modernization effort at the Agriculture Department, to make the agency that delivers subsidies and loans to farmers more Internet-friendly and free of dependence on an obsolete computing environment, is falling behind schedule, says the Government Accountability Office.

In a report dated July 20, the GAO says the Modernize and Innovate the Delivery of Agricultural Systems--aka MIDAS--won't hold a systems requirements review until December when it was scheduled for May, and has indefinitely postponed a high-level design review that should have occurred in July.

Agriculture's implementation cost estimate of $305 million and total life cycle cost estimate of $473 million is also suspect, the report says. The implementation estimate was developed in 2007 and doesn't reflect changes since made to the program, the report adds.

MIDAS aims to replace the IBM Application System 400 computers at the 2,300 Farm Service Agency offices nationwide with a hosting infrastructure that has an instance of SAP enterprise resource planning software at its back. IBM discontinued the AS/400 series in 2000; the FSA's maintenance contract on the machines expires in 2013, and the agency "anticipates that the contract will be difficult to renew," the report notes.

Among the pitfalls for farmers under the current computing environment is limited access to the FSA online; most transactions require a visit to the local FSA office--where FSA personnel must switch between various applications in order to retrieve data, which are also entirely stored at local offices. As a result, farmers must pick a single local office with which to do business.

When FSA launched MIDAS in 2004, agency officials wanted a custom-coded solution, but changed their minds in summer 2006, selecting SAP software in February 2008 and systems integrator SRA in a $500 million contract in December 2009. (Due to a protest, SRA did not begin work until May 2010.) So far, Agriculture has obligated $66 million on SRA and other MIDAS contractors, the report says.

When deciding to go with SAP rather than a custom-coded solution, FSA also shortened the MIDAS implementation schedule from a decade to two years, in part by reducing the requirement analysis phase from four years to five months and the analysis and design phase from three-and-a-half years to nine months, the GAO report says.

The program office has since managed to complete the project planning phase in October 2010--one month later than planned--but has started to slip other deadlines. The program is meant to achieve full operating capability in September 2012.

In response to GAO recommendations, Agriculture officials said they are developing new cost estimates, and will "revise as appropriate" the overall schedule.

For more:
- download the report, GAO-11-586 (.pdf)

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