Monday, November 04, 2002

Enterprise Employee Portal Update Phil wrote about employee websites last week. I would like to comment, and tie it in with my vision for the employee portal and the progress we have made on it. "The more I look at it, the less I see the difference between the kind of site a shared service organization like ITS or Fleet might build for its customers and the employee facing web site for the organization (like Innerweb).  They ought to be one and the same." Right on. I think the consolidation of service distribution needs to be the key business requirement for the portal. Cute gadgets are fun, and may keep people's attention for a while, but it is the services that people find on sites that keep them coming back. With our development of the employee portal to date we have focused on aggregating the services of Finance and DHRM for starters. Features like payroll, W2, W4, benefits, retirement, etc. In the future, I can see us adding other services and converging the employee's idea of "support" into one resource. This would definitely be a phased effort. One caveat, though, is that I have not yet been able to do a full business case for bringing all of those services together. We are really at the very beginning of the process that we need to go through to build a successful employee portal. That's not to say that we haven't made progress. ITS has been working along with some other agencies to develop an enterprise employee portal using Novell's NPS product. We have a prototype that we are testing now. It doesn't agregate all of the services that we want for the first release, but we know how it will work. Granted, we have some work to do to move this project out from under the auspices of ITS and into an enterprise forum. We've got to make this thing a sanctioned enterprise project, complete with an enterprise project executive, and commitment from the cabinet for support. It's got to have a vision, scope and a charter, which I am working on. In the meantime, progress on the enterprise employee portal is contingent on the development of an authentication system using SiteMinder 5. That is another one of my products (whew!) and we are moving forward with the scoping phase for that project as well. I will be working to get customer input on both portal and authentication. I could work full time on both of these. Please email me or call me with any questions. 1:57:30 PM

Committee Quote Lester J. Pourciau. "There is no monument dedicated to the memory of a committee." [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog] This is a great quote. Teams are strong, but they are only as strong as their members. 1:27:39 PM

Enterprise Payment Gateway Another very important initiative that is underway right now is the Enterprise Payment Gateway. Lloyd Johnson from DNR is the enterprise project executive, and we had our first meeting with him a week and a half ago. Prior to that meeting, Dave Fletcher held a few meetings to discuss the complexity of this project. Believe me, this is a very complex project that will need to be done in stages. A month or so ago I wrote a vision statement that was presented to the cabinet. We reviewed the vision statement in the meeting with the project group, and I was asked to be the scribe for a scoping document. Members of the team were supposed to send me their suggestions for the scoping document, but so far I have only received stuff from one person. This is going to be a big project. Preliminary requirements include integration and automatic reconciliation with FINET, the state's financial system, common API for implementation in applications, and a strategy for getting the UII payment stuff migrated to the new enterprise system. I don't thing people realize the amount of effort and commitment this project is going to take. 9:34:10 AM

Citizen Directory I attended a meeting a week ago to begin the discussion on the Citizen Directory. What is the Citizen Directory, you ask? Well here is my vision of it: The Citizen Directory is a place where identity and application access information is stored for participating citizens. It will only contain those citizens that choose to access state web applications. In fact, the first data set will come from Utah Interactive's data. Certain vital information will be stored, and application profiles will be associated with user records. Citizen Directory will be a part of the Utah Master Directory (UMD), which will contain employee information. These directories are an advancement from the state's current Novell Directory System (NDS), but the technology and the intended uses are similar. In my opinion, we should call the whole thing UMD, and not distinguish between employee directories and citizen directories. Ideally, the citizen part of UMD should look like the employee part, with only certain attributes different (after all, aren't employees just a subset of citizens?). The Citizen Directory will be used as the source of truth for authenticating and authorizing citizens to access Utah.gov online services. The enterprise authentication infrastructure will refer to UMD/Citizen Directory to check login credentials, and then applications will manage profile information stored for authorization purposes. Applications will not use UMD/Citizen Directory as a data store. They are still responsible for maintaining their own application database. This project is a very big deal. All of the governor's e government strategy hangs on the success and reliability of the Citizen Directory. Applications like eRep also rely completely on it. I think it should be accorded more priority by the cabinet, and an enterprise project executive needs to be selected ASAP. I will help however I can. 8:25:03 AM

Actuate Progress The Actuate cross functional team met last week to discuss progress on the actuate product. We are spending some of our time creating a stable, sandboxed environment for DOH so their mission-critical reports won't be dependent on our less-than-stable actuate platform. We are also spending some of our time evaluating the reports that we have in production to see if we can find ways to make the whole environment more stable and make the reports run faster. There are two other major efforts that we are beginning to tackle with actuate. One is determining appropriate acceptance test criteria for new or modified reports. We want to catch problem reports before they get into production (a novel idea, I know). Also, we are looking at what it will take for us to migrate to actuate 6. We have customers that are anxious to test new reports written specifically for 6. I don't have a date for when 6 will be available, but we are definitely working on it. 7:52:04 AM

DPS Needs Consoles I am finally working on a product in my Wireless Services product. The Department of Public Safety is needing new dispatch consoles, and I have been asked to write a business case for providing financing for them. Apparently this is how we did it for them in the past. Basically, we buy the consoles for them, install them, maintain them, and charge them a monthly fee until they are completely depreciated. This way DPS doesn't have to go to the legislature and ask for more money, because they already have a budget for making those payments. I just have to figure out all of the details and make sure it is a good business decision. 7:41:50 AM

© Copyright 2002 Dave McNamee. Last update: 12/3/2002; 8:09:49 AM.