Butch Luckie, chief of information technology business analytics at the U.S. Air Force, has said the service branch has achieved nearly 17 percent reduction in the service branch’s IT budget of more than $3.9 billion during the past two years.Luckie told Federal News Radio in an interview published Thursday that figure represents approximately $565 million in potential savings over the past two years as the Air Force aims to bend the IT cost curve by 20 percent.
He said his office monitors the military branch’s overall IT spending by tracking about 1,100 contract vehicles for IT goods and services across the federal government and extracting data from the Federal Procurement Data System-Next Generation platform.
“How we get our data from FPDS-NG is we pull the data by the contract numbers†every quarter, Luckie told the station.
“Then we will work to categorize it down to the spend by running a series of scripts against it once we load it out to our SQL server.â€
Luckie also cited the service branch’s implementation of a joint enterprise license agreement to acquire Cisco maintenance support through the use of data.
Other topics Luckie discussed in the interview include the service’s adoption of category management, challenges associated with software categorization and lack of hardware and software asset management systems.
