[ISN] IT security problems cause two agencies to slip in PMA scorecard

[InfoSec News]

http://www.gcn.com/vol1_no1/daily-updates/34843-1.html

By Jason Miller 
GCN Staff
1/19/05

Systems security concerns caused the Veterans Affairs Department.s and
the Small Business Administration.s e-government initiatives to drop a
grade each in the latest ratings on the President.s Management Agenda.

Clay Johnson, the Office of Management and Budget.s deputy director
for management, said in a letter released today that these were two of
four agencies that slipped up in the final grading for fiscal 2004.

Johnson said the Defense Department dropped a grade under the
competitive sourcing initiative because it was not announcing
competitions as planned, and the Office of Personnel Management fell
to red under improved financial performance because its inspector
general found new material weaknesses.

Each quarter, the administration gives agencies green, yellow or red
scores for their efforts to meet the goals of the five agenda items.

Green means an agency has met all the standards for success, yellow
means it has met some but not all and red means there are serious
problems. OMB grades each agency on its overall status and on its
progress toward implementing the agenda items.

While these four agencies tripped up under the latest scores, seven
agencies improved, including the Social Security Administration, which
earned a green under e-government.

In all, the administration handed out 39 green scores, 51 yellow and
40 red, compared with 35 greens, 55 yellows and 40 reds in the
September evaluation.

Veterans. and SBA.s slips under e-government mark the first time an
agency has dropped a color grade since the September 2003 rating, four
scorecards ago.

Still, under e-government, eight agencies received greens, 10 earned
yellows and eight got reds, the same count as the last scorecard.

The Smithsonian Institution remains the only agency with red scores in
every category, while SSA and the departments of Energy and
Transportation are green in four of five categories.

Karen Evans, OMB.s administrator for e-government and IT, said in a
letter released with the scorecard that the White House.s plans for
e-government will continue along the same path of identifying .new
opportunities for stronger management of federal government IT
investments..

In the letter, she said the human resources and financial management
Lines of Business Consolidation initiatives will save $5 billion over
the next 10 years because of the standardization of business processes
and functions.

Agencies will begin selecting shared service providers in 2005 and
shut down existing financial or human resources systems once migration
to the shared service providers is complete.

OMB.s new chief architect, Richard Burk, by the end of the month will
deliver a strategic plan for the Federal Enterprise Architecture. Burk
also will lead OMB.s efforts to work more closely with agencies to
help them improve their architectures and gain the benefits of using
their EAs.

Evans also said 26 agencies.up from two last year.are using the P3P
standard to provide a summary privacy notice accessible by public
browsers. And 16 of 24 agencies reported 90 percent or more of their
IT systems were certified and accredited as secure. Last year only 13
agencies said they had reached the 90 percent mark.