Harris Wins $600 Million Deal With Census Bureau

The U.S. Census Bureau has selected Melbourne, Fla.-based Harris to manage its five-year $600 million Field Data Collection Automation (FDCA) program, which will integrate systems supporting roughly 500 local offices and the more than 500,000 individuals responsible for collecting data for the 2010 Census.

Until now, Census data collection involved paper address lists, maps and questionnaires, resulting in significant labor costs, an extensive amount of time and a higher margin of error. For the 2010 Census, automated systems will capture information during interviews, which will be delivered to the Bureau's database systems in near real-time. A practice run using the automated system is scheduled for 2008.

Harris will manage the program, with enterprise, mobile, telecom and database products, and support and services provided by seven partner companies: Accenture, Unisys, Dell, High Tech Computer, Oracle, Client Network Services and Headstrong. All devices being used throughout the program will be running on Microsoft's Windows Mobile Platform.

Harris was awarded an eight-year, $210 million contract by the Census Bureau in 2002 as part of the Bureau's Accuracy Improvement Project. The company provideds integration services for the Master Address File (MAF) and Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding Referencing (TIGER) database, which is the format used to describe land attributes such as roads, buildings, rivers, and lakes.

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