The Department of the Interior, created by Congress in 1849, is a multitiered organization that currently employs approximately 70,000 people in about 2,400 locations throughout the United States. The Secretary of the Interior heads the agency, which comprises approximately 30 offices and committees and eight bureaus. Five Assistant Secretaries support the Secretary of the Interior at the department level. One of these is responsible for Policy, Management and Budget. The others are responsible for mission-related matters including Land and Minerals Management, Indian Affairs, Fish and Wildlife and Parks, and Water and Science. At the next level of the organization, eight bureaus, aligned with these Assistant Secretaries, are responsible for achieving Interior’s diverse missions. Interior’s missions include managing approximately 500 million acres of land—about one-fifth of the total U.S. land mass—and about 1.8 billion acres of the Outer Continental Shelf; fulfilling the government’s trust responsibility to American Indians and Alaska Natives; conserving and protecting fish and wildlife; offering recreational opportunities; managing the National Park System; providing stewardship of energy and mineral resources; fostering the sound use of land and water resources; helping with the management of the National Fire Plan; ensuring the reclamation and restoration of surface mining sites; and providing scientific information on resource, natural hazard, and earth science issues. Figure 1 shows how Interior is organized. Information technology (IT) investments play a vital role in Interior’s ability to fulfill its missions. Given the diversity of these missions and operating environments, the character of these investments also varies substantially. For example, the department uses a land mobile radio infrastructure to support geographically dispersed public safety and protection missions. These missions include law enforcement on federal and tribal lands, urban and wildland firefighting, seismic monitoring, wildlife tracking management of national parks, and water reclamation activities. In contrast, Interior’s Minerals Management Service owns systems that track oil and gas production on public lands and maintains records on royalties that are due to the federal government and to American Indian tribes. Interior’s bureaus and associated program offices propose, fund, and manage these kinds of investments, while certain departmental offices— such as the Offices of Financial Management and Personnel Policy— propose and manage other systems that support administrative functions. Interior’s National Business Center is responsible for managing and operating departmental information systems on a fee-for-service basis and for providing other kinds of administrative support, such as facilities management. In fiscal year 2003, Interior invested over $850 million in IT—about 6 percent of its total budget. While the Secretary of the Interior has the ultimate responsibility for managing these investments—including overseeing and guiding the development, management, and use of information resources and information technology throughout the department—Interior’s CIO is responsible for providing leadership and oversight for IT investment management processes throughout the agency. To that end, Interior’s CIO serves as the chair of the department’s IT Management Council, which oversees “major” investments in IT. About 2,255 of Interior’s staff of about 70,000 are classified as IT professionals. Thirty-four staff provided direct support to the CIO in the department’s Office of the CIO during fiscal year 2003. Appendix I provides additional information about each bureau’s missions, functions, staffing, and total expenditures on IT for fiscal year 2003. Prior reviews of IT projects performed at Interior over the past decade—by GAO and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) as well as Interior’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG)—have revealed significant weaknesses in IT investment management practices at both the department and the bureau levels. Over the last several years, we have issued a series of reports on Interior’s major IT investments and associated management practices. In April and July of 1999, we reported that Interior had not followed sound management practices in the early stages of its effort to acquire the Trust Asset and Accounting Management System, a system designed to manage Indian assets and land records. We also reported that, as a result of poor planning, Interior could not ensure that the system would meet financial management needs cost effectively or mitigate system development risks adequately. In September 2000, we reported that Interior still needed to address significant remaining risks. Among other things, we recommended that Interior take steps to strengthen its software development and acquisition processes and that it regularly assess the progress being made in implementing this system. Between 1995 and 2001, we reported on Interior’s efforts to acquire a land and mineral case processing system called Automated Land and Mineral Record System(ALMRS)/Modernization and raised concerns about the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) and the prime contractor’s abilities to complete, integrate, and test the new software system and complete the current schedule. Among other things, we recommended that BLM take steps to strengthen its IT investment management processes and systems acquisition capabilities. ALMRS was terminated in 1999, but many of the management weaknesses we had identified remained. In 2000 and 2001, we reported that BLM had been working to implement our recommendations, and we further recommended that BLM develop a plan to integrate all of the corrective actions necessary to implement our recommendations and establish a schedule for completing them. In August 2002, Interior’s OIG reported that the department did not have a process to ensure that IT capital investments or projects focused on departmental mission objectives or federal government goals and initiatives—principally because of its decentralized approach to IT investment management. The OIG further stated that only 20 investment projects—representing over 24 percent of the total—were subject to departmental review and approval in fiscal years 2002 and 2003 through submission of capital asset plans. Therefore, about $1 billion in Interior IT investment projects were not subject to department-level review and approval during those 2 years. Consistent with these reports, OMB reported in the President’s fiscal year 2003 budget that Interior was putting large sums of public funds at high risk for failure and that it had not complied with applicable legislative requirements that were established in the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995 and the Clinger-Cohen Act of 1996. OMB also reported that the department had not been able to adequately identify major projects within its IT portfolio or to demonstrate through adequate business cases the need for all of the major projects that it did identify. In addition, out of the 23 federal agencies included in the fiscal year 2003 budget supplemental document entitled Performance Information for Major IT Investments, the Department of the Interior was one of only two agencies that were unable to provide the type of information on the actual performance of their IT investments. In the Presidentís fiscal year 2004 budget, OMB reported that Interior had made significant strides toward more fully identifying its IT investments and strengthening the business cases that it developed for major IT projects, although 20 of its 35 initial submissions remained on OMB’s at-risk list. Our IT Investment Management (ITIM) maturity framework, issued in May 2000, is a useful tool that can help Interior to improve its IT investment management capabilities. The ITIM framework can be used to determine both the status of an agency’s current IT investment management capabilities and what additional steps need to be taken to put more effective processes in place. The ITIM framework establishes a hierarchical set of five maturity stages. Each stage builds upon the lower stages and represents increased capabilities toward achieving both stable and effective (and thus mature) IT investment management processes. Except for the first stage—which largely reflects ad hoc, undefined, and undisciplined decision and oversight processes—each maturity stage is composed of critical processes that are essential to satisfying the requirements of that stage. These critical processes are defined by key practices that include organizational commitments (e.g., policies and procedures), prerequisites (e.g., resource allocation), and activities (e.g., implementing procedures). Key practices are the specific conditions that must be in place and tasks that must be performed for an organization to effectively implement the necessary critical processes. Figure 2 shows the five ITIM stages and a brief description of each stage. While the ITIM framework defines critical processes and key practices in general terms, our work at multitiered organizations, such as the Postal Service and the Department of Justice, showed that specific roles and responsibilities may vary by organizational tier. For example, in such organizations, department-level management has overall responsibility for a process, while component-level management is responsible for ensuring that applicable requirements defined by the department are met and that operational units such as program offices take primary responsibility for performing the day-to-day activities that are described by ITIM, in accordance with management expectations. In such an environment, the presence of well-established and managed processes at lower levels of the organization can provide a level of assurance to the department concerning the quality and reliability of proposals for new investments, information reported on the actual performance of projects, and budget requests. In an agency like Interior, in which organizations at different levels execute various aspects of IT investment management, it is essential that top agency management establish and oversee processes throughout the agency to ensure that effective investment management practices are being adhered to. Over the past decade, Congress has enacted a series of laws that require centralized management and performance reporting to ensure that agencies can demonstrate that they are making the best funding decisions to support their mission needs. The Clinger-Cohen Act of 1996 specifically requires that the head of each agency designate a CIO to implement a process that maximizes the value and assesses and manages the risk of IT investments. Under the Clinger-Cohen Act, the Department of the Interior’s CIO has the ultimate responsibility for ensuring the cost- effectiveness of decisions made by program managers to expend funds on IT in support of the agency’s mission needs.