U.S. IT Budget: New Geospatial Line of Business

I'm not sure what this really means, but Fed Sources reports that there are three new lines of business in the President's IT budget:


There are three new "Lines of Business" (LOBs) (IT Infrastructure, Geospatial and Budgeting). The six existing LOBs are Case Management, Federal Health Architecture, Financial Management, Human Resources Management, Grants Management and Information System Security.


Can someone more savvy in budget issues explain the significance, or lack thereof, of this addition?

Update 2/8 am:

This from a Q & A with White House on Director of Office Management and Budget, Joshua Bolton:


Q Your budget proposes three new line of business programs in IT infrastructure, geospatial and budget formulation. Can you go into some detail about that, and what you expect?

DIRECTOR BOLTEN: Clay, is that something you want to take?

Q The question is, the three new lines of business -- IT infrastructure, geospatial and budget formulation, how they´ll bring benefits or what they´ll require.

MR. JOHNSON: All three of those programs are -- deal with matters that are common across many agencies. And so we looked to come up with government-wide solutions to government-wide opportunities or problems. Geospatial -- there are a number of agencies that use geospatial information. And rather than each of them have been trying to come up with separate mechanisms for collecting this information and having accurate resources to turn to, we´re coming up with a resource that all agencies can tap into.

The other two were?

Q IT infrastructure and budget formulation.

MR. JOHNSON: Well, by budget formulation, they´re looking for common -- developing common expenditure codes that all agencies can use that will allow us to pull up data by expense type much more -- with a much more productive fashion, so we can have better information, better diagnostic information about our expenditures.

Q And then IT infrastructure?

MR. JOHNSON: IT infrastructure is there are a number of common infrastructure expenditures that every agency faces -- IT security, IT training, a help desk and so forth. And we´re looking for coming up with government-wide solutions to those common needs that every agency has.

I'm guessing they are speaking of Geospatial One-Stop? Perhaps its matured enough to have its own line of business? Again, input from those who understand this process would be appreciated!
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Posted by Adena Schutzberg at 06:00 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)



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Here's the Geospatoial text from page 153 of "Analytical Perspectives, Budget of the United States Govern-ment, Fiscal Year 2007", found at http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2007/pdf/spec.pdf

"Geospatial.—to identify opportunities for opti-mizing and consolidating Federal geospatial-re-lated investments to reduce the cost of Govern-ment and improve services to citizens through business performance improvements. The LoB taskforce will analyze cost benefits, alternatives and risks, define roles and responsibilities, ex-pected outcomes, performance measures, mile-stones, and timelines. The Federal Geographic Data Committee will continue to develop the Na-tional Spatial Data Infrastructure and full imple-mentation will require Federal agencies to play a critical role; therefore, the establishment of the Geospatial LoB will ensure sustainable business model for Federal partners to establish a sustain-able business model for Federal partners to col-laborate on geospatial-related activities and in-vestments."
#1 Mike Mahaffie (Link) on 2006-02-08 11:01 (Reply)