US Department of Defense urged to address serious IT systems flaws

• The US Government Accountability Office has published recommendations for the Department of Defense
• These are aimed at IT systems and include cybersecurity shortfalls
• Some programs overspent and took months longer than scheduled

The US Government's Department of Defense is set to spend $10.9 billion on maintaining IT business programs from 2023-2025 - but not all of these programs meet required performance levels, a new report from the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) has declared.

Recommendations from the department include asking the Secretary of Defense to direct the Chief Information Officer to “ensure that IT business programs identify and report results data on the minimum number of performance metrics in each category, as appropriate, as part of the department's submission to the Federal IT Dashboard.”

These programs are critical defense systems, and 4 were identified without “developed plans to implement a more rigorous cybersecurity approach—zero trust architecture—by the 2027 deadline”. A further 2 programs didn’t have strategies in place to reduce cybersecurity threats.

Recommendations going forward

Of the 24 IT business programs, 14 reported cost and/or schedule changes since January 2023, which includes 12 programs that report an increase of cost. These are between $6.1 million and $815.5 million (and a median of $173.5 million) - and 7 of the programs report a delay in schedule from between 3 months and 48 months (median of 15 months).

The GAO reminded the DoD that IT is “critical to the success of DoD's major business functions." and that "not identifying and reporting results data on performance metrics in each category makes it harder to determine if these programs are achieving their intended goals," the report summary confirms.

This comes not long after the news that the US Government hailed IT cuts as a key part of billion-dollar DoD savings, with contracts terminated, primarily for "consulting and other non-essential services”.

Affected firms included Deloitte, Booz Allen, and Accenture, with terminations specifically targeting the “$1.8 billion in consulting contracts the Defense Health Agency awarded to various private sector firms, a $1.4 billion enterprise cloud IT services contract awarded to a software reseller, and a $500 million Navy contract for business process consulting.”

Via The Register

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