NOAA plans IT consolidation, will issue RFP

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will release a request for proposals in June to consolidate to a single help desk at its main facility in Silver Spring, Md.

Consolidation to a single help desk is aimed at reducing the cost of managing contractors and providing a consistent service for NOAA staff, said Carl Staton, the agency's CIO and director of high performance computing and communications.

"We want to be as efficient as we can, including contractor overhead on multiple contracts," he said during an industry luncheon sponsored by the Association for Federal Information Resources Management.

NOAA has also begun e-mail and server consolidation with a goal of moving to 50 or fewer servers from 70 this fiscal year and to an architecture of three or four clusters geographically dispersed around the country to provide e-mail service. Any increase in contractual help would come in fiscal 2006, he said.