How Much Does DPS Cost?

July 14, 2009 Comments Off

I was reading an article recently about the efforts of the Obama administration to increase transparency in government spending. This article was focusing specifically on their efforts to highlight government spending on IT projects through a newly created website, called the Federal IT Dashboard.

I was curious if this website would contain any information about the government IT project that is so important to our industry, the DPS system. The website has many nice charts and graphs you can zoom in and view, and while there were a lot of DOD projects listed, DPS did not seem to be one of them. Then I started looking at a section of the website that allows you to download feeds of raw data that has been filed with the Office of Management and Budget for IT projects. I discovered a data feed for an “Exhibit 53″ report, which contained data on over 2500 IT projects for the DOD alone. Sure enough, one of those projects was the DPS system. Here is some of the data for DPS in that data feed:

title: DEFENSE PERSONAL PROPERTY SYSTEM
description: A next generation fully integrated best-of-breed centralized web-based system for the management of personal property shipments for the Department of Defense. It is a key quality of life program for our Service members and their families.
totalinvestmentsPY:29.767
totalinvestmentsCY:20.065
totalinvestmentsBY:20.511

A few conclusions I drew about the last 3 elements from researching the instruction booklet for agencies completing the Exhibit 53 report. First, I believe PY stands for “Prior Year” or 2008, CY stands for “Current Year” or 2009, and BY stands for “Budget Year” or 2010. As far as the numbers listed, I believe they represent millions of dollars spent. The instructions indicate agencies should report all dollars in millions, and to be sure I searched only for projects that were between 10-50 Million, and the DPS entry came up in the search.

So it appears that from 2008-2010, DOD will spend over $70 million on implementing and maintaining the DPS computer system. If you add in whatever money was spent on DPS prior to 2008, it is clear that the government has a significant investment in this computer system.