Even as the Army is preparing to move as much as 1.6 million email users to a cloud-based system, the House Armed Services Committee is withholding all but 2 percent of the project’s budget for next year until a “business case†can be made for the cloud switch, Nextgov reports.
The House Emerging Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee has indicated it will only authorize the Army to spend $1.7 million out of a requested $85.4 million for the Microsoft Exchange-based email system using the Defense Information Systems Agency secure cloud.
In the meantime, the subcommittee wants to see a cost-benefit analysis and a full accounting for the project, including life-cycle costs.
According to Nextgov, a spokeswoman for the Army’s chief information officer said the cloud migration is expected to save the service as much as $100 million a year starting in 2013.
As with any emerging technology being adopted in the public sector, business cases and AoAs are very hard to validate without access to real world best practices anode lessons learned. Since FFRDCs and traditional suppliers lack formal relationships with fortune 1000 companies, you end up with flawed assumptions and metrics.
Filling this void is the focus of the IT Acquiisition Advisory Council (IT-AAC), which represents nonTraditional IT communities of practice, agile methods, and metrics captured from early adopters. Its no wonder why GPO’s FDsys, AF ‘s E-FOIA, and Navy CANES have avoided common traps.