July 22, 2010

The National Nuclear Security Administration's Management of the Product Realization Integrated Digital Enterprise Program

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), in partnership with the Department of Defense, maintains the Nation's arsenal of nuclear weapons through a geographically dispersed Nuclear Weapons Complex (Complex). In support of this mission, NNSA relies upon numerous and disparate site-specific and cross-Complex information systems to help manage the nuclear weapon product life-cycle process. NNSA, in its own planning documents, has noted that since Fiscal Year (FY) 2000, it had devoted considerable resources to these systems, acknowledging that their operation and management costs were not always well defined nor completely understood. To respond effectively to changing requirements, and, share and exchange weapon product information among sites, NNSA established its Product Realization Integrated Digital Enterprise (PRIDE) Program in FY 2007. PRIDE was established to develop and deploy a modernized, integrated suite of enhanced information technology (IT) capabilities to securely deliver weapon product life-cycle information to users across sites. NNSA anticipated that PRIDE would result in a reduction in weapon development cycle times and associated expenses. By the second year of the program, PRIDE consisted of over 100 sub-projects. NNSA originally planned to complete development activities within the PRIDE program by the end of FY 2014 at a projected total cost of approximately $83 million. Given the importance and significant cost of the PRIDE initiative, we conducted this audit to determine whether development had been managed in a manner that would permit the system to achieve its intended goals and objectives.

Topic: Management & Administration