Migrating Immigration and Customs Enforcement systems to a consolidated Homeland Security Department data center was "painful from an end-user perspective," said Brent Bushey, project manager for ICE's Alien Criminal Response Information Management System.

"Migrating a legacy system that ties into 12 other systems that nobody ever fully understood," is a tedious process, he said Dec. 8 at AFCEA Bethesda breakfast event. But Bushey says consolidation was a "forcing function" for better standardization.

"Moving everything to a consolidated data center we're actually beginning to standardize and streamline our processes," he said.

The Defense Department has taken a slightly different tack to data center consolidation, choosing to move systems to standardized, virtualized environments first and then migrating to a consolidated environment. DoD Chief Information Officer Teri Takai said in May 2011 "what's important from a foundation perspective is being able to standardize, being able to simplify and being able to operate in a much more uniform way."

One advantage to standardizing after consolidation is that it's more clear what elements need to be standardized, said Bushey.

"You don't want to standardize for standardizing sake," he said. "I want to have smart standardization and I want it to be customer-focused and efficient. If that's what we're saying by standardizing processes then, yeah, I want it now and I want it all the time."

At the same time that doesn't mean agencies should be rushing to consolidate systems that aren't properly prepared for migration, said Bushey.

"The easy road is 99 percent of the time not the best road. So when we're looking for an easy way to get things in to a data center, when we're looking to cut some corners, I call it participating in 'the big lie.' We're going to make the wrong move," he said.

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