Briefs

NSA has new CIO

Richard Turner, former chief information officer of the Federal Trade Commission, started work July 17 as CIO at the National Security Agency. Turner has about three decades of experience in information systems and information resources management. He also has worked for NASA and the Army.

A key part of the CIO's job will be interacting with the winning vendor for Project Groundbreaker, NSA's $4 billion procurement to outsource its nonspy systems. That contract is due to be awarded by July 31.

FAA system helps delay rulemaking

A new Federal Aviation Administration automated system that tracks only the most significant rules and is limited to one office contributes to the FAA's slow rulemaking process, the General Accounting Office has found.

GAO analysts wrote in a recent report that the system, which combines existing project-tracking and document-management systems, is being used to track only the FAA's 24 A-list rules and hasn't been implemented much beyond the FAA Office of Rulemaking.

"The small number of rules that it consistently tracks and a lack of agency.wide implementation [have] made the system less useful than it could potentially be," GAO analysts found.

Because the project-tracking portion of the system focuses only on 24 rules, the system is missing data for many other major rulemaking proj.ects. Rule.making officials told GAO that limited resources have prevented them from keeping track of nonpriority rules. But if a project joins the A-list rules, historic data that could be useful for assessing it would be missing, GAO analysts said.

The document-management portion of the system has not been fully implemented across all FAA offices involved in rulemaking, according to GAO.