USDA seeks integrated financial-management system

The Agriculture Department wants to replace its core financial-management system with an updated one that provides general accounting, funds management and financial reports.

Under the recent request for proposals, vendors would provide program management, transition and migration support, application and integrator services, and hosting services for the USDA Financial Management Modernization Initiative.

The contract would be for one year with nine one-year options, with the first five years for agency deployments and data migration and the second five for operation and maintenance. Agriculture anticipates full implementation by mid-2011.

An integrated system will improve the department's financial management performance, align with the enterprise architecture and best practices, and comply with federal system standards, the department said in a posting last week.

In line with the Office of Management and Budget's financial-management Line of Business, Agriculture plans to use a federal or commercial center of excellence or other federal hosting services to operate the production financial system, the deployment of a single Web-based system to replace several mainframe systems and the migration of several legacy accounting systems into one.

Agriculture may select just one contractor to provide all services or one contractor to provide the combination of integration services and software licenses, and a second contractor to provide hosting.

The new system will be an integral part of the department enterprise architecture, supporting a financial-services line of business to streamline financial business processes across Agriculture. The proposed system will support federal e-authentication requirements and a single point of validation and access for vendor data. It also will be designed to integrate with E-Payroll, E-Travel and Grants.gov systems.

Agriculture will conduct a preproposal conference Jan. 19. Proposals are due March 13.

Mary Mosquera is a staff writer for Washington Technology's sister publication, Government Computer News.