One down, many to go

By Jason Miller
Executive Editor
FederalNewsRadio

The Justice Department has a new organization managing its data centers.

After nearly a year, Justice has turned over its data centers to a team made up of federal employees and contractors from Lockheed Martin. The two groups teamed up to bid on a public-private competition under Office of Management and Budget circular A-76.

Vance Hitch, Justice’s chief information officer, says the new organization will improve customer service and provide new skills to make their data centers work better.

Hitch would not say how much savings he expects, but he believes the new set up will benefit the department.

The data center is one major project that Justice is in the final stages of implementing.

Justice has several other projects still in the early stages.

Hitch says Justice has been working on the Law Enforcement Information Sharing Program for more than three years, but many of the projects are on just really getting started.

The OneDOJ system is one example. Hitch says the goal of OneDOJ is to share information regionally with state and local law enforcement organizations.

“OneDOJ provides a federated search of all our information,” says Hitch at an even Wednesday in Vienna, Va., sponsored Input. “OneDOJ has more detailed information a police office or analyst has ever had access to before.”

Hitch says there are more than 10 million records from the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency, Bureau of Prisons and the Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives bureau.

Justice also is providing access to OneDOJ to the Navy, the Homeland Security Department and several state and local law enforcement agencies.

“We will continue to roll out OneDOJ in other states and cities, including Florida and Chicago,” Hitch says.

A second information sharing system is the National Data Exchange (N-Dex). Justice hired Raytheon in February 2007 to build the system.

N-Dex will provide accurate, timely, and useful information across jurisdictional boundaries and to provide new investigative tools to fight crime and terrorism, the department says.

Hitch says the FBI will roll out the second phase of N-Dex next summer.

The technology that connects all of these is the Integrated Wireless Network (IWN).

IWN is a multi agency project led by Justice to consolidate federal wireless communications for first responder and homeland security communities. The communications technology also will interoperate with state and local agencies.

Justice is partnering with the Homeland Security and the Treasury departments to build this $5.5 billion project. Justice awarded a contract in April 2007 to General Dynamics and progress has been fairly slow for a number of reasons.

Hitch says Justice is scaling back IWN until Congress appropriates more funding.

“We took a hard look and decided to get back to the basics,” he says. “Our current equipment is old and failing. We need to deal with that problem first and then add the bells and whistles later.”

Hitch says he is optimistic Congress will come through with the $171 million Justice requested for 2009. If lawmakers appropriate the full request, Justice would receive $45 million more than it did in 2008.

Justice’s budget still is up in the air as neither the Senate nor the House has passed the Commerce, Justice, State spending bill.

Beyond these information sharing projects, Hitch says his other priorities including implementing the litigation case management system and the consolidated debt collection system.

Justice also will begin the recompetition for the Information Technology Support Services (ITSS) contract next fall, Hitch says.

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On the Web:

Justice Department – N-Dex Web site

Justice Department – Integrated Wireless Network Web site

Justice Department – OneDOJ Web site

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