BIA - National Irrigation Information Management System (NIIMS)
Investment ID: 010-000000070
Overview
Program Title
BIA - National Irrigation Information Management System (NIIMS)
Description
The BIA water and irrigation program purpose is to improve the management of land and natural resource assets through the delivery of water consistent with applicable State and Federal law, in an environmentally responsible and cost-efficient manner. The supporting system is a legacy billing, debt collection, and rate setting platform that supports financial management for irrigation O&M fees. The benefit to the customers is to allow Indian irrigation projects to be more productive, bringing idle farmland into production. These communities are located in primarily remote under-served areas and receive approximately $900M in economic benefit through this program. Managed by the Office of Trust Services, Division of Water and Power.
Type of Program
Major IT Investments
Multi-Agency Category
Not Applicable
Associated Websites
https://www.bia.gov/service/irrigation
Investment Detail
The NIIMS system processes approximately $35M in annual receivables where BIA assesses fees and collects monies for the cost of administering, operating, maintaining and rehabilitating BIA owned Indian irrigation projects. This investment is integral to generating approximately $1.6 billion in direct harvest value of the irrigated crops grown and results in total economic output in purchases and goods of approximately $2.9 billion to the surrounding communities (2019 dollars). Benefits for stakeholders external to the government include greater accuracy in billing, increased convenience, and a more reliable system of records for controlling access to their PII. Pay.gov was introduced in 2013, customer adoption skyrocketed with a 42.9% increase from FY2019 to FY2020, while paper checks decreased by 24.87%.
The move to a centralized payment lockbox has yielded significant improvements in collections, payment handling, and accounting. This has also resulted in a steady reduction in total staff for centralized operations and reduced workload for field staff, with an estimated cut of 3 FTE across field irrigation offices. This allows irrigation project field offices to target those funds to high priority operation and maintenance tasks. NIIMS is leveraging shared services per the Federal Enterprise Architecture, the Cloud Smart and Shared First White House initiatives. System costs have been reduced through the use of technology, and the migrating of the NIIMS legacy system off a mainframe computing facility to web-based server application. Future replacement to a modern technology platform will further improve our efficiency and greatly reduce the risk of system failure, thereby maintaining compliance with 25 CFR 171 and other regulations as applicable.
The move to a centralized payment lockbox has yielded significant improvements in collections, payment handling, and accounting. This has also resulted in a steady reduction in total staff for centralized operations and reduced workload for field staff, with an estimated cut of 3 FTE across field irrigation offices. This allows irrigation project field offices to target those funds to high priority operation and maintenance tasks. NIIMS is leveraging shared services per the Federal Enterprise Architecture, the Cloud Smart and Shared First White House initiatives. System costs have been reduced through the use of technology, and the migrating of the NIIMS legacy system off a mainframe computing facility to web-based server application. Future replacement to a modern technology platform will further improve our efficiency and greatly reduce the risk of system failure, thereby maintaining compliance with 25 CFR 171 and other regulations as applicable.