Citizant Continues Development on HUD’s Initiative to Better Serve Citizens and Foster Inter-Agency Collaboration

CHANTILLY, Va., March 4, 2008 — Citizant, one of the Washington region’s fastest-growing providers of government professional technical solutions, has been awarded a task order to maintain, operate and enhance the National Housing Locator System (NHLS) on behalf of U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development (HUD). This task order has an estimated value of $1.9 million if all options are exercised.

Citizant began working with HUD in 2006 to develop the NHLS, a Web-based system for federal, state, and local agencies to rapidly identify available housing for people displaced from their homes by a disaster. One of the lessons learned from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita was that the government lacked a national inventory of available housing to accommodate evacuees. HUD closed this gap with an inter-governmental tool designed with Web 2.0 technologies. The system combines federal housing resources with commercial housing locators and Web sites in one platform to rapidly identify available housing based on various search options.

Under this new task order, Citizant will continue to provide operational and maintenance services and will enhance NHLS with important new features, including:

• Expanding the customer service/case management applications to help manage the location of evacuees and provide access to resources such as the American Red Cross
• Establishing relationships with more than 4,000 public housing authorities so that data and available housing inventory are in place prior to any disaster
• Improving the interface with the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) systems to better facilitate resource allocation
• Enhancing Web service capabilities to support interaction among programs within HUD.

“We are proud of Citizant’s collaboration with HUD on the NHLS, since this work truly makes a difference in the lives of the citizens we all serve,” said Alba M. Alemán, president of Citizant. "Now we are focused on bringing even more resources to families impacted by natural disasters and providing a platform to allow government agencies to work closely together during these disaster recovery periods. This phase of development further underscores HUD’s commitment to quickly and efficiently serve the needs of citizens displaced by disaster.”

About Citizant
Citizant partners with government organizations to develop forward-thinking business and technology solutions that create a better future for all citizens. Citizant specializes in enterprise architecture, custom application development and program management support. Citizant is ISO 9001:2000 certified and has been independently appraised at SEI CMMI Level 2. Citizant is a fast-growing, woman-owned 8(a) business headquartered in Chantilly, Va., with an office in Washington, D.C. More information about the company is available at www.citizant.com.

Contact Citizant:
Marcie Cheney
703-667-9420 Ext. 140
mcheney@citizant.com