NARA ERA spending plan shows deferred functionality

Among the now-indefinitely postponed functionalities once planned for the National Archives and Records Administration's Electronic Records Archive system is the ability to monitor and execute disposition of electronic records, shows a NARA fiscal 2011 spending plan.

The plan (.pdf), obtained by FierceGovernmentIT through a Freedom of Information Act request (.pdf), is dated Jan. 13, 2011 and is for what NARA and Office of Management and Budget officials say will be system's final year of development. (On the cover page is a typo that purports to date the document to January 2010, but the plan refers to events that took place well after and elsewhere the report is dated to January 2011.) Archivist David Ferriero recently said electronic record archiving faces a crisis, with records in danger of being lost.

ERA underwent a OMB "TechStat" review in July 2010, following which the plan says NARA officials reprioritized planned ERA functionality.

Of the 1,406 requirements that NARA staff had settled on by July 30, 2010 as the final number contractor Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT) would implement, 976 will be completed by the end of this fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, the spending plan states. Lockheed Martin is meant to hand over the final development iteration to NARA on Sept. 6, the plan says.

(The numbers and dates come from a January 2011 update to the plan, which was first submitted to Congress in October 2010, but which the GAO criticized in a March 4 report for, among other things, lacking clarity over requirements. A statement from the older part of the plan states that 1,129 requirements will be implemented by the end of fiscal 2011.)

Other deferred functionality includes automated implementation of records disposition agreements; automated generation of records descriptions; and a planned move to a hierarchical storage management system, the plan states.

ERA has come under repeated scrutiny for lateness and cost overruns since NARA awarded Lockheed Martin a $317 million cost plus award fee contract in 2005 to develop the system. According to a Jan. 13 Government Accountability Office report, NARA would need up to $1 billion total to finish the system as planned. The program received $72 million for fiscal 2011 in the spending bill Congress approved earlier this month, a nearly 16 percent reduction from the $85.5 million it received in fiscal 2010.

The spending plan says ERA suffered schedule slippage while developing the system's third increment. The plan was to redesign the first increment--known as the ERA Base Instance, which was deployed in June 2008. The redesign was necessary "to get back to the flexible/configurable system design that would allow us to more efficiently build and integrate the remaining functions," the plan states. But, "The redesign of the Base Instance was harder than originally projected," the plan adds.

Although late, the redesign nonetheless appears to have been successful, the plan says.

 For more:
- download the NARA fiscal 2011 ERA spending plan (.pdf)

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