The State Department is making progress in its IT modernization effort, but not meeting the goals it set for fiscal year 2019 as part of the President’s Management Agenda, an update to the agency’s priority goals shows.
Released September 19, the update highlights the four areas that State is looking to improve in its modernization effort – enterprise-wide data accessibility, collaboration, service delivery, and data security. However, past updates have shown the State Department making slow progress and slipping on timelines. This update shows progress, even if not on the initial timeline.
On data accessibility, the update shows that State is piloting cloud app integrations with a new integrated database management solution, taking application access for on-prem into production, and migrating 89.5 percent of users to cloud-based email. However, this progress still leaves the department behind on its stated goals for the year, as all of these goals had earlier expected completion dates.
On collaboration, the department is in the process of expanding its wi-fi deployments, and expects to exceed its goal of 30 locations with wi-fi in fiscal year 2019. State is also expanding its modern mobile device management solution while setting a new goal of retiring legacy applications.
On service delivery, the department is designing its new enterprise architecture program, with some progress but still behind the expected timeline. State is also working on TBM implementation, with a new project manager and solution to aid the process improvement activities.
On data security, State has fully implemented DMARC across the department, met its goal on the number of moderate impact systems with authority to operate (ATO), and is very close to its ATO goal for high impact systems.