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Records Management: Cost Overruns make NARA's new RM System a Billion Dollar One
Huge cost overruns on a new Records Management system being built for NARA now put a final price tag on a completed system near $1 billion, compared to an original estimate of $317 million. Current estimates are that the project has cost $567 million, although David Ferriero, head of the National Archives, says the total spend to date is closer to $267 million. A Washington Post article says the total figure for final implementation could even reach $1.4 billion, more than a $1 billion over the original estimate.
An audit of the program by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports that much of the problem is due to very lax oversight from the National Archives of work performed by the prime contractor, Lockheed Martin. The project was originally awarded over six years ago. The new program is the biggest project ever undertaken by the National Archives. The GAO report is critical of the archives saying that they have “not been positioned to identify potential cost and schedule problems early and thus have not been able to take timely actions to correct problems and avoid program schedule delays and cost increases.”
Other reasons behind the program’s problems are missed schedule milestones and large turnover of staff members both within the Archives and also at Lockheed Martin.
Last year the program was called out as one of the most costly and troubled IT investments made by the federal government. The archive program is scheduled to roll out this fall, but it appears the system will lack key features that had been part of the original plan, such as full-text search over document content. Only search over document titles will be possible, a very limiting constraint.
Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) called for the GAO audit and said that the poor oversight from the Archives “call into question whether the federal government has an effective strategy for maintaining and making available to the public the tremendous amount of electronic records” produced by the government. He said the problems “have been apparent for some time” yet remain unaddressed.
