The Department of Defense’s watchdog will audit the platform that’s supposed to index the military’s IT resources.
The Office of the Inspector General of the DoD announced last week that its auditors will be visiting the CIOs for the Army, Navy and Air Force in order to assess the completeness of the DOD Information Technology Portfolio Repository, or DITPR, which guides all management and budget decisions regarding computers and information technology for the Pentagon.
“This audit was self-initiated,” an IG official told FedScoop. “We are doing this audit on the accuracy and completeness of DITPR to establish a baseline for future work and in support of DOD’s strategic cyber goal to defend DOD information networks.”
Launched in 2005, DITPR was initially chartered as a temporary solution to fulfill requirements laid out in the National Defense Authorization Act, but has remained in service with progressive upgrades to keep its abilities up-to-date.
DITPR houses basic information on “critical and mission essential” IT systems and their interfaces.
In order to effectively maintain DOD systems, access to a thorough information repository is critical — say those who’ve wrestled the tiger of Pentagon IT.
“If you don’t know what you own, you can’t secure, protect, manage, license, upgrade or replace it,” former DOD CIO David Wennergren told FedScoop. “From reducing unnecessary expenses to modernizing legacy systems and enhancing cybersecurity, knowing what you own and how it’s used is crucial.”
The need for a complete portfolio is especially relevant as the government has made a push to move from aging legacy systems to more modern platforms, added Wennergren, now executive VP of operations and technology at the Professional Services Council.
“Federal agencies are spending 80 percent or more of their IT funding on maintaining an aging, outdated and less secure legacy infrastructure and systems. There is a compelling need to migrate off of legacy systems to take advantage of cloud computing, better security, digital services and other new technologies and approaches,” he said.
“My hope is that the audit will validate the accuracy and completeness of data in DITPR, or provide specific helpful recommendations that further improve the quality of DITPR data.”
