Federal Opportunity Alert: BI & Reporting Needs at OMB & GSA

by Chris Wiedemann, Analyst

If you’ve been following the progress of the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative (FDCCI), you might have seen a recent GAO report that contained some mixed messages about the program’s progress.

First, the good news: according to the report, agencies have already closed around 420 data centers, with another 968 planned for closure by December 2015. This will put the government 285 closures short of the original target for consolidation set by OMB – still, when compared to other large initiatives in federal IT, FDCCI looks more or less on schedule.

However, significant obstacles to tracking FDCCI progress still remain. Most notably, OMB and the GSA Program Management Office have not been tracking actual cost savings caused by data center closures, which calls into question their ability to demonstrate $3 billion in savings by 2015 – another key milestone of the original data center consolidation mandate. In fact, the latest memo on the topic did not mention a cost savings goal, which further reflects the difficulty of quantifying FDCCI savings. This could open the door for business intelligence vendors, particularly those with tools that can analyze and report on large amounts of data. If you have the tools to help GSA and OMB demonstrate cost savings through FDCCI, you’re likely to find a receptive audience right now.