Conference spotlights leaders, innovation

Carroll is the Army's program officer for enterprise programs and helped organize one of the first IAC Executive Leadership Conferences nearly 15 years ago.

"Knowing Janice as I did makes this a very special honor. I'm very surprised," said Carroll, who received the award at ELC Oct. 25 in Hershey, Pa.

Barry West, ACT president and chief information officer of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said Carroll rose to the top of the nominations for many reasons, including his willingness to mentor federal employees and his ability to bring people together to accomplish a project.

ACT, an organization of government IT professionals, seeks to promote education and cooperation across different levels of government. IAC is an affiliate organization comprised of government contractors.

Other award winners include:

Tammie Lyles-Santiago, e-government enterprise program manager for the Defense Department, and Edward Meagher, deputy CIO for the Veterans Affairs Department, received federal individual Contributors of the Year awards.

Venkatapathi Puvvada of Unisys Corp. and Rick Slifer of Corvis Government Solutions Inc. of Columbia, Md., received corporate individual Contributors of the Year awards.

The Ambit Group of Reston, Va., EDS Corp. and the Project Performance Corp. of McLean, Va., received corporate Contributor of the Year awards.

Janine Gray of AT&T Corp. and Linda Martin of Unisys received the Chairman's Award for special contributions to IAC.

Thirty-five federal and industry IT employees were recognized for completing the IT Partners Program, a management training series.

DHS considers capital fund

The Homeland Security Department will set up a working capital fund to pay for its IT infrastructure consolidation work. Chief Information Officer Steve Cooper said that the Homeland Security Department Financial Accountability Act, H.R. 4259, lets the agency use funding from each directorate to pay for intra-agency projects.

Cooper said at ELC that his office would release the first set of requests for proposals for infrastructure consolidation work by early January. The infrastructure consolidation work includes merging five unclassified wide area networks and continuing to reduce the number of e-mail systems in use, Cooper said. The department also plans to consolidate services for help desk, IT security, integration and collaboration support.
OMB eyes 'loan' program

The Office of Management and Budget is considering an innovation fund to pay for its lines-of-business consolidation projects.

John Sindelar, OMB's program manager for the e-government initiative, said that such a fund would be a way to get money upfront for the projects, and then pay it back from savings that the systems garner.

OMB set up three task forces to develop business cases to consolidate agency financial management, human resources and grants administration.

Sindelar said at ELC that OMB has not made a decision on whether to ask Congress for this type of fund, but it is an option.

USAID, State to merge systems

The U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department are moving closer to merging their back-office systems.

For the fiscal 2006 budget process, the two agencies submitted a business case to pay for a shared enterprise architecture and already are working on their first joint EA effort on telecommunications and IT security.

The joint business cases will pay for the development of the modernization blueprint so the two agencies can share resources more effectively and find areas suitable for collaboration, said Joseph Gueron, USAID chief of information policy and administration division, at ELC.