The BPD flies under the radar providing some truly essential services to our government

At the 2-3 May 2012 HP Software Government Summit, Joe Gribble of the Department of Treasury Bureau of Public Debt brought up some really amazing success stories of how they are following executive directives and transforming their IT business processes. The Bureau of Public Debt is combining forces with the Department’s Financial Management Services division to provide IT services jointly to both units. This move is helping comply with data center consolidation directives (moving from five to two). Additionally, this is providing an expected savings of $120M over five years.

The BPD is jumping feet first into virtualization, both at the desktop and server levels. Joe is especially proud of their implementation of desktop virtualization, and the process and cost savings they are (and will continue to) realizing. But as all this change is occurring, change management tools become mission critical. To manage change, the BPD has created an auditing tool that measures the state of every device on the network, and compares it to the previous day’s known state. This tool identifies devices with unauthorized changes, provides benchmarks for intentional change and empower IT administrators. Through use of this tool, unauthorized changes have all but disappeared.

The BPD was an early adopter of public key infrastructure (PKI) and personal identity verification (PIV) capabilities. Joe and the BPD turned PKI and PIV cards into a huge strength and have become one of the key providers of PKI and PIV solutions to the federal government. When government can provide government with quality solutions, we all win. PKI and PIV solutions are key factors in cybersecurity, and go a long way to ensuring identity in computer systems. PIV solutions are extremely helpful in multi-factor authentication, which is key for identification and authentication solutions.

Joe has implemented his “strategery of change;” the process by which they are moving forward as an IT enterprise. By clearly identifying what they are doing, where they are going, and how they are implementing change, the IT strategy has been embraced enterprise wide. It is always good to hear government success stories, and we should all be proud of what Joe and the BPD are accomplishing in our increasingly constrained economic times.