The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) program that uses biometrics to verify the identities of foreign nationals seeking to enter the United States continues to expand and grow in complexity, which is making it more costly to operate and thus driving the need to find more efficient ways to operate, a department official said yesterday.
Already in recent years the US-VISIT program has made upgrades such as adding an enterprise service bus on the front end of the program so that there is a common interface for the various stakeholders that query the IDENT biometric database, Greg Ambrose, chief information officer for the US-VISIT program, said at IDGA’s Biometrics & Identity Management Summit. In addition, the program has installed a local service bus that allows for a common interface for matching fingerprints, “so that we can be matcher agnostic,” he said.
But technology continues to evolve at a rapid pace and US-VISIT needs to leverage these changes to better manage its operating costs, Ambrose said.
The “next evolution” in the program” is “collapsing this infrastructure” because the various layers that make up US-VISIT have grown larger and more complex, Ambrose said. The IDENT database contains 1.8 billion fingerprints and is growing, he said. There are two million new registrations monthly through US-VISIT and over 200,000 identifications per day.
The system has over 1,700 servers and it works but is growing more complex and costly to operate, Ambrose said. Accenture [ACN] is the prime contractor for DHS on US-VISIT.
One example that Ambrose gave for improving efficiencies is how US-VISIT stores fingerprint images. IDENT was stood up in the mid-1990s and the US-VISIT program, which manages IDENT, began in 2004.
Since then, Apple [APPL] has introduced the iPhone, which has the ability to take and store many photos that users can quickly flip through. Similar technology can be used to enable US-VISIT users to more quickly handle images, Ambrose said.
Money saved through these operating efficiencies could be used toward other technology advances, Ambrose said.
In addition to fingerprints, facial and iris images are beginning to populate the IDENT database although on a small scale as the Border Patrol collects these biometrics as part of a pilot program for US-VISIT. Ambrose said that the pilot program remains in the data collection phase for the additional biometric modalities.
As DHS and other federal departments and agencies enter a more constrained budget environment, there is further incentive to drive down operating cost of enterprise systems.
“We need shared services using open standards that operate on top of common infrastructure,” Ambrose said. “Gone are the days of a big monolithic system where a vendor is entrenched for decades.” He added that government information technology has to change with regard to how systems are implemented.
Ambrose said that government is moving in the direction of shared services and cautioned his government colleagues against having exclusive systems.
“So we need to continue to exercise rigorous scope management in these large government programs so that we can ensure the limited dollars are directed to the right projects so we can provide needed technology tools to those on the nation’s front lines while reducing operating costs,” Ambrose said.