Army Buys $5M in Project Portfolio Management Software
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The Army Small Computer Program spent $5 million to purchase 5,000 licenses of ProSight Portfolios and ProSight Fast Track software on April 21, 2005, in order to help implement project portfolio management servicewide. ProSight is compatible with Microsoft Project.
Army Chief Information Officer Lt. Gen. Steve Boutelle said he believes the products will help better track the service’s 4,500 systems and better spend its annual IT budget ($6.1 billion requested for FY 2006), becoming the U.S. Army’s system of record for IT investments and systems and helping the service identify inefficient or redundant IT systems or investments.
The service has an enterprise strategy that groups IT investments into domains and portfolios and assigns people to manage them. The service is working on a memorandum to establish mission area and domain leads in response to the Defense Department’s IT portfolio strategy.
Army officials will issue another memo in June 2005 detailing the implementation and training strategy for the initiative. They expect worldwide implementation, training, and deployment will take 12 to 18 months.
Apparently, problem with a logistics system in Iraq made improving the management and interoperability of the service’s systems a higher priority. The Army was already actively pursuing a contract portfolio management decision support tool, and ProSight was already under consideration.
According to FCW.com, this software buy represents the largest order to date under the General Services Administration’s new SmartBUY program. SmartBUY is an initiative of the federal government to support effective enterprise level software management through the aggregate buying of commercial software governmentwide in an effort to achieve bulk savings.
- Federal Computer Weekly (May 5, 2005) – Army buys $5M of tracking software
- Federal Computer Weekly (May 12, 2005) – OMB Clears Up SmartBuy
