Action Plans to Meet
Risks Faced by NARA's Acquisition of Major System
September 2003
Introduction
Over the last three decades, NARA has successfully accessioned, preserved, and provided access to a limited quantity of highly structured electronic records because the volume and record types were manageable in size and diversity. However, the volume, complexity, and diversity of Federal records have changed significantly, making the current business and technical strategies inadequate and inefficient. In its August 2003 report, Records Management: National Archives and Records Administration's Acquisition of Major System Faces Risks, the General Accounting Office (GAO) provided recommendations to mitigate the risks associated with the ERA program acquisition policies, plans, and practices. NARA accepts GAO's recommendations and the following is a summary of NARA's current activities to address the recommendations.
Electronic Records Archives Initiative
The Electronic Records Archives (ERA) Program is NARA's strategic response to the challenges associated with long-term preservation of electronic records. Its goal is to enable NARA to preserve and provide access to virtually any type of electronic records created by the Federal Government. ERA must be inherently responsive to problems associated with electronic records and adapt to new and unpredictable challenges and opportunities that will arise as information technology and its application in Government continue to evolve. The resulting system will have three primary characteristics:
- It must be evolvable,
- It must preserve authentic records, and
- It must be scalable.
To develop and build ERA, NARA is collaborating with government, industry, academic, and international partners who are leading the way in developing the next generation of the national information structure. The system will be scalable both upward to meet NARA's exponentially growing workload, and downward so it will be useful to smaller archives, libraries, universities, and businesses. The technology developed for ERA will provide a common framework for all agencies in managing their electronic records for as long as needed in conducting their business. ERA will maximize the use of government and commercial off-the-shelf components, be developed in a series of usable increments, and use performance based contracting methods. Currently, the ERA Program is conducting research and development and preparing to release a final Request for Proposal (RFP) to award a contract for the design and development of the system.
Recommendation 1:
To reduce the risks associated with NARA's efforts to design and acquire the Electronic Records Archives, we recommend that the U.S. Archivist direct the NARA Chief Information Officer to address weaknesses in the acquisition policies, plans and practices by:
- revising the ERA Life Cycle document and associated procedures and practices to conform with IEEE standards;
- revising the ERA Concept of Operations to conform to IEEE standards, including complete description of the current and proposed systems;
- revising the ERA Acquisition Strategy to conform to IEEE standards and the Federal Acquisition Regulation;
- revising the ERA Risk Management Plan to provide processes and procedures specific to the ERA program;
- revising the ERA Quality Assurance Plan to conform to appropriate industry standards, establishing a vigorous, independent ERA quality assessment process, and providing the staffing resources necessary to ensure that quality assessment duties are performed effectively; and
- filling key vacant ERA positions.
We accept this recommendation. The ERA Program Management Office (PMO), through a support contractor, is conducting verification and validation reviews of all documents as they are updated to ensure they conform to Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) standards to the degree that they should for this stage in the program. Some of the documents have already been completed others will be completed in the near future. The completion dates for the documents mentioned in the recommendation are:
- ERA Life Cycle: completed September 30, 2003
- ERA Concept of Operations: completed August 25, 2003
- ERA Acquisition Strategy: completed August 26, 2003
- ERA Risk Management Plan: completed September 30, 2003
- ERA Quality Assurance Plan: completed July 23, 2003 (now titled Quality Management Plan)
We are in the process of recruiting for the 10 remaining unfilled ERA positions identified. We expect to have all positions filled by the end of this calendar year.
Recommendation 2:
To reduce the risks associated with NARA's efforts to design and acquire the Electronic Records Archives, we recommend that the U.S. Archivist direct the NARA Chief Information Officer to immediately address weaknesses in tracking cost and schedule by:
- developing an ERA schedule that is based on a comprehensive work breakdown structure (including associated costs and other resources) and establishes dependencies between successor and predecessor tasks; and
- using earned value management to capture and monitor progress for the entire ERA program.
We accept this recommendation. We have developed a detailed work breakdown structure for the ERA Program. The cost and schedule baselines will be in place by September 30, 2003. We are aligning the ERA Program control activities to comply with the ANSI-748A standard for earned value management mandated by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Circular A-11. We are implementing a program-wide scheduling and earned value management analysis process and toolset that will provide significantly improved cost and schedule control. We have acquired the ANSI-748A compliant tool and will begin implementation on October 15, 2003. We expect the tool and processes to be fully implemented by January 2004.
Page Last Updated: 07/08/08
