TAMPA, Fla.—Independent operating testing that was completed earlier in September of an upgraded version of the Defense Department’s biometric database went well and the system is expected to be deployed next week, an Army official said Sept. 18.
The results of the tests will be presented tomorrow to Douglas Wiltsie, the Army’s Program Executive Officer for Enterprise Information Systems, and he is expected to approve the DoD Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS) 1.2 version to enter operations on Sept. 26, Col. Sandy Vann-Olejasz, project manager DoD Biometrics, said at the Global Identity Summit.
The results of the testing, which began in August, were “very positive” and “very favorable toward a deployment decision,” Vann-Olejasz said.
Deploying ABIS 1.2 had been expected a year ago but technical issues forced fixes to be made and additional testing to be done, which meant that the 1.0 version of the system continues to be used. With the upgrade about to go into effect, that will mean more storage capacity, higher throughput for search queries, more accurate search results, continuous watchlist availability with no blackouts, and improved search algorithms, Vann-Olejasz said.
A year ago the Army had also been planning on recompleting the ABIS system in favor of a new biometric repository but DoD nixed that given budget constraints, forcing the Army to rely on a bridging capability for ABIS longer into the future. Vann-Olejasz said that the results from an ongoing Analysis of Alternatives (AoA) are expected next July.
Tight budgets will be a big driver, she said, as will compliance and data sharing.
“We have and architecture out there where we are paying a lot of money to…create interfaces into the repository,” Vann-Olejasz said. “Compliance is going to be big. The appetite for integrating non-standard, non-compliant systems into the authoritative repository is not going to be there in the future. We are going to pride ourselves on being a standards-based enterprise so that we can share information more seamlessly.”
Another driver will be data sharing, she said. There are a lot of unique business processes within DoD and the AoA will look at workflows and transaction managers that “help us share that data effectively and efficiently,” she said.
Northrop Grumman [NOC] is the prime contractor for ABIS.