NASA Effort At RiskNASA Effort At Risk

NASA's latest effort to modernize its financial-management system is at risk, according to four reports issued by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress. One report faults the space agency for implementing significant parts of its Integrated Financial Management Program without first putting in place an enterprise architecture. Without one, NASA could waste millions of dollars building duplicate systems that don't interoperate, the GAO says.

NASA concedes the need for an enterprise architecture and has established an architecture program office, designated a chief architect, and selected an architecture framework. But the GAO says NASA must do much more to guide the development and deployment of the financial-management system.

NASA initiated the Integrated Financial Management Program in April 2000-its third effort to manage its finances-and about half of its core financial modules have been implemented. The system isn't expected to be fully deployed until the fall of 2006, at an estimated cost of nearly $1 billion.