Summary

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on the Bureau of Land Management's (BLM) Automated Land and Mineral Record System (ALMRS) Release 2 information system project.

GAO noted that: (1) BLM is now planning the ALMRS Release 2 project to add to the ALMRS initial operating capability (IOC); (2) BLM's preliminary estimate for the life cycle cost of ALMRS Release 2 is about $42 million; (3) software development is planned for fiscal years (FY) 1998 and 1999 for a total estimated cost of $15.2 million; (4) hardware acquisition, planned for FY 1999, is estimated at $7.9 million for additional servers, additional disk storage, and upgrades to the telecommunications network; (5) the remaining estimated cost, approximately $19 million, is primarily for operations and maintenance through FY 2005; and (6) the ALMRS Release 2 project is intended to improve ALMRS IOC by providing a more economical and efficient database structure, capabilities that were planned for ALMRS IOC but could not be delivered within that projects's budget or schedule, and new automated capabilities; (7) BLM's preliminary planning documents show that ALMRS Release 2 will be composed of several modules; (8) since the project is in the preliminary planning stage, BLM descriptions and estimated costs could change as the Bureau further defines its requirements; (9) therefore BLM has not yet performed the detailed planning work needed to fully define and justify the project; (10) according to the Assistant Director, Information Resources Management, BLM recently acquired a project manager and will be performing detailed planning work over the next few months to refine the Bureau's detailed requirements and prepare a technical design for the project; (11) the official also stated that BLM is working on the development of a project management plan to outline the scope, design, development, and deployment of Release 2; and (12) BLM expects this detailed planning work to be completed by September 30, 1997, in full compliance with the Department of the Interior's systems development policies.