Protecting People and the EnvironmentUNITED STATES NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION
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1 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
2 NUCLEAR REGULATORY COMMISSION
3 OFFICE OF SECRETARY
4 ***
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6 BRIEFING ON STATUS OF CIO PROGRAMS
7 PERFORMANCE AND PLANS
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10 Conference Room 1F-16
11 White Flint Building I
12 11555 Rockville Pike
13 Rockville, Maryland
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15 Thursday, January 20, 2000
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17 The Commission met, pursuant to notice, at 10:00
18 a.m., the Honorable Richard Meserve, Chairman of the
19 Commission, presiding.
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21 COMMISSIONER'S PRESENT:
22 RICHARD A. MESERVE, Chairman
23 NILS J. DIAZ, Commissioner
24 JEFFREY S. MERRIFIELD, Commissioner
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1 STAFF AND PRSENTERS SEATED AT THE COMMISSIONERS' TABLE:
2 ANNETTE L. VIETTI-COOK, Secretary
3 KAREN D. CYR, General Counsel
4 STUART REITER, Acting CIO
5 LYNN SCATTOLINI, Director, Information Management
6 Division, OCIO
7 MOE LEVIN, Director, Applications Development
8 Division, OCIO
9 JAMES SHIELDS, Chief, Infrastructure Development
10 and Implementation Branch, OCIO
11 FRANCINE GOLDBERG, Director, Planning and Resource
12 Management Division, OCIO
13 JESSE CLOUD, Chief, Planning and Architecture
14 Branch, OCIO
15 JESSE FUNCHES, Chief Financial Officer, U.S. NRC
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1 P R O C E E D I N G S
2 [10:02 a.m.]
3 CHAIRMAN MESERVE: Good morning. I'm very pleased
4 to see you here. I was a little concerned, with the
5 weather, that some of you would not be able to make it.
6 Let me indicate at the outset that we have noticed
7 the temperature of the room and it's not the personalities
8 involved with the meeting. It is my understanding that some
9 efforts are being made to try to bring the temperature level
10 up, but given the size of the room, it may be a while.
11 As I think all of you know, we are here this
12 morning to have a meeting concerning the Office of the Chief
13 Information Officer, and, in particular, to discuss that
14 office's programs, performance and plans.
15 This office is a really fundamental component of
16 the agency that plays a critical role. At the intersection
17 of all of our activities among our staff is critically
18 dependent, increasingly dependent on the quality of our
19 communication systems. And as time goes on, our involvement
20 in intersection and interaction with stakeholders is going
21 to be increasingly dependent upon electronic means of
22 communication.
23 So we have -- this is a very important
24 organization and activity for the agency and we very much
25 welcome the opportunity to get a briefing on your
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1 activities.
2 Let me stress at the outset that we have limited
3 time available and the Commission would like to assure that
4 we have ample time for interaction; that the question and
5 answer is really, for us, among the most fruitful parts of
6 the meetings, because there are particular issues that we're
7 going to want to explore.
8 I know that you have been allocated, I think, 45
9 minutes for your initial presentation and let me strongly
10 urge you to stay within the deadline and I will let you know
11 when and if we happen to go over.
12 Let me turn to my fellow Commissioners and see if
13 they have any opening statements.
14 COMMISSIONER MERRIFIELD: I just have two
15 comments. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
16 First is I would agree with the Chairman and thank
17 the staff for making the effort to come in on what is a
18 difficult travel day. I know I've got two boys at home that
19 are playing with a brand new sled that I assembled last
20 night. But I felt it's important to be here, so to their
21 disappointment, it's hopefully better for all here.
22 The only other little comment I would make, and
23 I've made this comment in other staff presentations in the
24 past, since I am acronym impaired, I would suggest perhaps
25 if, next year, you may want to consider, in your slides, to
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1 do some kind of a perhaps cover sheet about some of the
2 acronyms that you have in here that aren't otherwise --
3 there is indeed no explanation what GLTS or RPS means. So
4 things like that you may want to fix next year.
5 Thank you.
6 MR. REITER: Point well taken.
7 CHAIRMAN MESERVE: Why don't we proceed?
8 MR. REITER: Thank you and good morning, Chairman
9 Meserve and Commissioner Diaz and Commissioner Merrifield,
10 and thank you for your opening comments.
11 As you mentioned, we are here today to review with
12 you the plants, programs and performance of the Office of
13 Chief Information Officer. Here with me today are Jim
14 Shields, Moe Levin, Lynn Scattolini, Fran Goldberg, and
15 Jesse Cloud. Jim is the Branch Chief of our Infrastructure
16 Development and Implementation Branch, and he is sitting in
17 for Jim Schaefer, who is Division Director of the
18 infrastructure group and who could not be here today.
19 Moe is the Division Director of our Applications
20 Development Branch. Lynn heads our ADAMS Development and
21 Implementation Program and is Director of our Information
22 Management Branch. Fran is the Division Director of
23 Planning and Resource Management Division and is currently
24 acting as the Director of the Information Management
25 Division, to allow Lynn to put additional focus on ADAMS.
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1 And Jesse is Branch Chief of our Planning and Architecture
2 Branch.
3 Before starting, we did want to take this
4 opportunity to extend to the NRC our best wishes for a happy
5 birthday. With your permission and for the sake of time,
6 what I would like to do is go through the presentation
7 material that we've prepared for today and then we would be
8 happy to answer questions, and we will certainly try to
9 respect the 45-minute time limit and beat it, if we can.
10 Foil two, please.
11 As the agenda foil shows, there are five topics
12 that we want to cover with you today. Our goal is to
13 provide you an overview of our services and programs,
14 identify some of the issues that we are addressing, what we
15 do to measure performance, and some improvement areas that
16 we think we can pursue, and what we're looking at when we
17 focus on the future.
18 Next foil.
19 This foil is an overview of our organization
20 chart. The Planning and Resource Management Division is
21 involved with capital planning and investment control. This
22 often, in conversation, shows up as CPIC, the CPIC program,
23 which is an acronym. The Planning and Resource Management
24 Branch is also concerned with our technology standards and
25 architectures and provides budgetary and human resource
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1 services to the office.
2 Infrastructure Services is involved with the
3 development, deployment, integration and management of our
4 infrastructure, and our infrastructure deals with our voice
5 data and video communications services, data center
6 operations, help desk support.
7 Application Services is involved in coordinating
8 all aspects of applications development and support for the
9 agency and it takes on an agency-wide perspective.
10 Information Management deals with the access to
11 agency information, providing internal services for
12 publishing, distribution, accessing agency documents and
13 other information, managing our official records and
14 supporting external reporting requirements. Many of the
15 functions provided through the Information Management
16 Division are required by law.
17 As the final block indicates, the special
18 attention that we've given to ADAMS since September by
19 having Lynn Scattolini take on the role as project
20 management during its implementation phase.
21 Next foil, please.
22 This next foil deals with some of the drivers that
23 we respond to and the drivers that we see show up in two
24 ways, business and technology drivers. Our programs and the
25 associated resources are driven by the needs of the NRC
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1 program and support offices and the regulatory environment
2 that we operate in. Our office is also driven by technology
3 change and the question that we think we bring to the table
4 is how effectively is technology being used to support
5 program and support offices achieve their business goals and
6 strategies.
7 There are formal processes used in industry that
8 assist organizations in answering this question. Our
9 program offices, as you know, are in the process of re-
10 baselining their goals and strategies and current automation
11 solutions need to be reexamined in the context of these
12 changes.
13 We are also driven by technology change, and this
14 shows up in several significant ways. As technologies
15 mature and the necessary infrastructures are put in place,
16 business opportunities to use these technologies take hold,
17 and this change is happening very quickly and we have
18 numerous examples here at NRC.
19 Two years ago, we had little web activity and
20 today we are working hard to anchor its use for both
21 external and internal communications. Two years ago, the
22 web offered little business value and today the web plays a
23 vital role in our public communications programs.
24 Two years ago, digital authentication did not play
25 a role in NRC's business processes and today we are being
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1 asked to move faster to enable program offices to use this
2 technology in conducting daily business transactions
3 electronically with their stakeholders.
4 There are other examples of technologies that have
5 broad value to other organizations and are on our radar
6 screen, but that we have not been able to evaluate yet
7 because of resource constraints.
8 There is one technology that has become very
9 important to us and its COTS, or commercial off-the-shelf
10 software. Commercial off-the-shelf software has taken the
11 place of in-house application development, to a great
12 extent. Movement to commercial off-the-shelf software
13 reflects a government-wide initiative to adopt private
14 sector best practices.
15 What it means is that instead of developing our
16 own applications, such as general ledgers, accounts
17 payables, payroll or document management systems, these
18 applications are purchased from software vendors. While
19 there will continue to exist circumstances that may require
20 in-house development efforts, industry and the private
21 sector are relying on COTS products to run their core
22 business functions.
23 While major vendors of COTS products, such as
24 PeopleSoft, SAT and J.D. Edwards, may not be the household
25 names that Microsoft has become, their growth and market
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1 penetration and influence has been very impressive.
2 In moving to COTS technology, we strike a
3 partnership with the vendor. We rely on the vendor for
4 needed enhancements for our business software. COTS vendors
5 work to keep their products current, both in function and
6 technology, to maintain and advance their competitive
7 position.
8 New releases of products require us to upgrade our
9 environment and these upgrades may entail significant effort
10 on our part.
11 In the spirit of the 25th anniversary celebration,
12 I asked my staff to reflect on what information technology
13 looked like at NRC 25 years ago. I am told that when NRC
14 was created 25 years ago, we had a keypunch room and a card-
15 reader to hook up to a mainframe computer at another agency.
16 The power users had specially adopted IBM Selectric
17 typewriters that served as mainframe terminals. Mini-
18 computers were introduced in the late '70s, with a few
19 stand-alone PCs.
20 As we discuss during the course of this
21 presentation, much change has occurred since then.
22 Next foil, please.
23 This foil deals with how we align ourselves with
24 our stakeholders, and our goal is to achieve a partnership
25 with our stakeholders and helping them meet their business
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1 goals. We believe that it is through a combination of
2 process and organization that we have the prerequisites in
3 place to achieve am effective and efficient information
4 technology function.
5 The Information Technology Business Council,
6 commonly known as ITBC, is an advisory group of senior
7 managers from each NRC office. The ITBC is our forum to
8 partner with offices, manage technology change, better align
9 business needs with technology solutions. The ITBC office
10 reviews investment proposals as part of the CPIC process and
11 provides recommendations to OCIO.
12 Jackie Silber of NRR Chairs the ITBC. Bruce
13 Mallett, Deputy Region Administrator for Region II, is
14 Deputy Chair, and Bruce will assume Jackie's role this
15 summer.
16 The Executive Council reviews and approves all
17 major agency IT investments and serves as the steering
18 committee for major IT programs. Offices sponsor and fund
19 their application programs. They are responsible for
20 presenting the business case to the Executive Council,
21 creating the project management plan, and managing
22 implementation.
23 The Applications Development Division is organized
24 around business area teams, the structures designed to
25 maximize their interaction with client offices, for both
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1 their planning and implementation efforts.
2 The capital planning and investment control
3 process, or CPIC, consists of a set of working procedures
4 used by the agency to manage the life cycle of IT
5 investments that exceed $50,000 and is our basic management
6 tool for controlling IT investments.
7 We believe the above framework provides for input,
8 direction, participation and challenge by our stakeholders
9 and, again, for it to be successful, it has to work as a
10 partnership between us and our stakeholders.
11 Next foil, please.
12 This foil identifies some of the services that we
13 provide both our internal and external stakeholders. It
14 covers services provided by both our information technology
15 and our information management functions.
16 While I won't discuss all of the services shown on
17 this foil and while this foil doesn't reflect all the
18 services that we provide, I will touch on a few.
19 On our external web, we have an average of 5,500
20 user sessions a day. The most interesting topics to the
21 viewing public are plant status reports, daily event
22 reports, and NRC news releases.
23 In 1999, we processed some 380 FOIA requests. Our
24 median response time was 17 days and we believe we have one
25 of the best performance records in the Federal Government in
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1 this service.
2 The last service shown on the foil deals with
3 cyber security. In September, we had 51 incidents of
4 unauthorized access attempts from the internet. Our
5 security strategy, which includes constant monitoring,
6 active reporting and continued refinement, has enabled us to
7 identify, track, monitor and block these attempted
8 intrusions.
9 Next foil.
10 Business offices, program and support offices
11 sponsor their own IT initiatives. They developed a business
12 case and they provide the funding. Our office, in our
13 office, we support their initiatives. We also have an
14 overarching goal of maintaining the integrity of the
15 agency's information and technology environment through our
16 responsibility to adhere to the agency's architecture and
17 standards.
18 We look at an IT initiatives from an agency, from
19 an overall agency perspective. We identify where local
20 initiatives may have adverse impact on agency goals, costs
21 or directions, and work with the sponsoring unit to find
22 alternative solutions.
23 We are, if you will, the regulators of the
24 agency's IT architecture and standards. Major office-
25 sponsored programs include STARFIRE, which is sponsored by
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1 the Chief Information Officer; RPS, which our reactor
2 program system, sponsored by NRR; and, GLTS, or the general
3 license tracking system, which is sponsored by NMSS.
4 Our CISSCO program provides a single contractor, Computer
5 Sciences Corporation, to provide a wide range of information
6 technology services to the agency. In effect, the CISSCO
7 program provides offices a one-stop shopping vehicle for
8 acquiring information technology services.
9 In general, we believe that while improvements can
10 be made, we have established a process that has been
11 effective in providing quality products in a timely manner.
12 Through the CPIC process, we lead the review and
13 approval of the business case for all IT projects. For
14 those greater than a half a million in costs, the Executive
15 Council is also involved. The process covers three phases
16 of the life cycle; planning, control and execution, and
17 post-completion review.
18 We work with project teams during the planning and
19 development phase. We take care to ensure that new systems
20 do not adversely affect current infrastructure services.
21 Our Infrastructure Division also provides the necessary
22 support for rolling out new systems, such as software
23 installations, help desk services, and ongoing production
24 operations support.
25 Next foil, please.
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1 We sponsor programs across our division and the
2 most visible of these programs today is ADAMS, our new
3 document management system. The next set of foils briefly
4 highlights our more significant program initiatives.
5 Foil nine, please.
6 We are very pleased with the results of our Y2K
7 remediation program. We were graded A by Congressman Horn
8 and ranked second for all Federal agencies. Fundamental
9 changes in the way that we do business are coming; digital
10 signaturing technology will provide assurance that documents
11 received by us or our stakeholders are authentic.
12 As noted earlier, this technology is just
13 beginning to take hold. Today we are on a fast track to
14 build the electronic bridges connecting us with our
15 stakeholders.
16 Next foil.
17 It was just two years ago that our resident
18 inspectors were continually frustrated by not being able to
19 have reliable access to agency applications, including e-
20 mail and internet access. The RISE program was completed
21 this past September and helped improve our customer
22 satisfaction. We were also pleased to receive some positive
23 feedback from the Chairman on his recent use of the RISE
24 service at Paducah.
25 On the office suite study, we have a vulnerability
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1 and we are looking at options. The COREL suite, in
2 particular, WordPerfect, is no longer the dominant player it
3 once was. COREL has seen some hard times, but continues to
4 be a viable organization at this time.
5 In addition to our concern about the long-term
6 health of COREL, we are also seeing a secondary effect that
7 is costing us. Software vendors will integrate their
8 products with other vendor products to enhance their
9 competitive position. For example, FILENET, the vendor of
10 our document management software, integrated Microsoft's
11 Word product into their FILENET product suite. We had to
12 pay our systems integrator to integrate WordPerfect into
13 ADAMS and we will incur ongoing maintenance costs.
14 However, we believe the cost of many migration
15 could be quite significant. The office suite study will
16 look at options and assess cost and benefit tradeoffs. The
17 business case being developed will be reviewed by our
18 stakeholders and we will look for the ITBC and EC
19 endorsement for our recommendations.
20 Next foil, please.
21 FTS-2001 deals with our migration of agency-wide
22 voice and data services to MCI. Our current FTS-2000
23 contract is expiring and our current provider, AT&T;, is not
24 an option under the FTS-2001 contract. Voice services
25 include long distance, domestic and international services.
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1 Data services include our network connections to the regions
2 and connections between the regions and the resident sites,
3 including the direct access lines to plant sites used by the
4 incident response center.
5 In working these changes, I would like to
6 acknowledge that it is a cooperative effort that we share
7 with the regions. The RISE program is also one in which a
8 strong partnership with the regions work to ensure the
9 success of the effort.
10 We project that FTS-2001 costs for the next six
11 years will total about $15 million. At current AT&T; rates,
12 that would be $21 million. That's a cost avoidance of about
13 a million dollars per year, which we have factored into our
14 budget.
15 The next program, infrastructure services and
16 support contract, deals with the recontracting for
17 infrastructure services that are not provided by FTS-2001.
18 Services such as desktop support, local area network
19 support, help desk, and network security.
20 As part of this program, we are planning to do
21 benchmarking studies, where we will assess the cost of
22 comparable services in other Federal agencies and in the
23 private sector. We will also consider alternative
24 contracting models, such performance-based contracting, in
25 which the vendor has monetary incentives for excellent
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1 performance and they share in cost savings.
2 We believe we are cost-effective today in
3 providing required infrastructure services. We are excited
4 about this program in that it gives us an opportunity to
5 more formally assess the health of our infrastructure and
6 positions us to apply best practices in the recontracting
7 process. By best practices, we mean providing needed
8 services at competitive costs.
9 Next foil, please, foil 12. Thank you.
10 The Clinger-Cohen Act requires CIOs to assess
11 agency IT skills and to develop plans to fill gaps. Over
12 the past two years, OCIO has focused on assessing the skill
13 set of its own staff and providing management across the
14 agency, with formal training on the principals, roles and
15 responsibilities that characterize the successful use of
16 information technology in businesses and organizations.
17 While these programs will continue, we are going
18 to place additional focus on closing the IT skill gap across
19 the agency and we work together with human resources in
20 doing this and HR has recently introduced additional
21 training programs for uplifting IT skills.
22 An area that we see additional opportunity beyond
23 basic skill development is working with staff to help them
24 take fuller advantage of the features of products we use
25 every day.
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1 Foil 13, please.
2 A recent SRM noted areas for improvement in our
3 web. These included improvements in navigation and ease of
4 finding information and the timeliness of information. We
5 have initiatives underway and will be working with
6 stakeholders, experts, and heavy users of the web, as well
7 as representatives from John Q Public in making our design
8 recommendations.
9 We are committed to provide the Commission with a
10 status report on the program and plans for our external
11 redesign activities by February 15.
12 I'd now like to take a few minutes to review with
13 you the ADAMS program.
14 Foil 14, please.
15 ADAMS is a two-year project to provide the agency
16 with a modern document management system. The program was
17 approved in 1997. The approach proposed in the business
18 case was utilize COTS technology. The COTS provider for
19 ADAMS is the FILENET Corporation, which is a recognized
20 leader in the area of document management systems.
21 The systems integrator for the ADAMS initiative is
22 the Computer Sciences Corporation, the lead vendor for our
23 CISSCO program.
24 Foil 15, please.
25 ADAMS is much more than the main systems it is
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1 replacing, NUDOCS and BRS. Each of these systems provides
2 document search and retrieval capability to our staff and
3 external stakeholders. ADAMS will support the full life
4 cycle requirements for managing documents. These needs are
5 significant. Today we process some 60,000 documents
6 annually with our NUDOCS system. The volume of documents
7 processed with ADAMS will be greater because ADAMS include
8 many administrative types of records, as well as
9 programmatic records.
10 Document processing in ADAMS starts with receipt
11 for external documents, which, in time, will largely be
12 electronic or document creation for internal documents.
13 ADAMS workflow will support collaborative review and
14 concurrence processes.
15 Signing, as we know it today, will be done
16 electronically and, with the exception of certain financial
17 documents, will not be necessary at all. ADAMS will house
18 the entire document, not just the bibliographical abstract
19 of the document, like our current systems do.
20 When you locate the document you want in ADAMS,
21 you are able to pull it up and work with it. You don't need
22 to order it, you don't need to go and get a copy from
23 microfiche. ADAMS will take us a long way in applying what
24 the electronic Freedom for Information Act and the Paperwork
25 Elimination Act, which requires agencies to accept
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1 electronically from their stakeholders documents by 2003.
2 Finally, ADAMS will provide for the electronic record-
3 keeping for our documents. Programs such as ADAMS bring
4 significant change to an organization. It is over a period
5 of time that the change is required to establish new
6 business procedures and fully take advantage or new
7 capabilities are realized. It also takes time to work out
8 startup bugs that have passed through the development
9 process. A six to 12-month period is not unusual.
10 With ADAMS, we have moved out of its development
11 phase and into its initial operations phase.
12 I also point out that the majority of information
13 people in the agency access is 18 months old or less. The
14 benefits of ADAMS will become more apparent to the staff as
15 the system is populated with the documents they use on a
16 daily basis.
17 Foil 16, please.
18 ADAMS operations started November 1. At that
19 time, we stopped entering documents into NUDOCS and started
20 entering documents into ADAMS. Since November 1, the image
21 and full text of some 15,000 documents have been entered
22 into ADAMS. The public is getting access to documents
23 significantly more quickly than they did with the old
24 system.
25 We are comparing two-week cycle times to get
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1 documents to the public with the old system to three days
2 with ADAMS. Our original plans called for ADAMS to become
3 our official record-keeping system January 1. This would
4 have entailed having all components of ADAMS up and running
5 at that time.
6 In December, we recommended to the Executive
7 Council an alternative step-wise deployment strategy,
8 recommended by the ADAMS working group, which the Executive
9 Council endorsed.
10 We recommended this alternative approach for
11 several reasons. We asked ourselves two questions; is NRC
12 ready for ADAMS and is ADAMS ready for the NRC. Yellow
13 caution lights came up for both questions. We felt the
14 staff needed additional time to become familiar with the
15 operations and features of ADAMS and the development of
16 document templates, which provides the guidance for entering
17 documents into ADAMS, was behind plan.
18 Progress in this area was spotty. Some offices,
19 like NRR, were on or ahead of schedule, but they were the
20 exception. When we looked at ADAMS, a number if its
21 components were not where we wanted them to be. Regional
22 document capture stations were just being put in place,
23 giving little time for staff to gain some operating
24 experience.
25 We were also seeing startup issues, that I will
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1 touch on in the next foil. In combination, these
2 circumstances prompted us to adopt our current step-wise
3 deployment approach.
4 Foil 17, please.
5 ADAMS has two sets of user populations, NRC staff
6 and the public. Different sets of issues surfaced for each
7 of these populations. A strategy that would have allowed us
8 to bring these populations up in a step-wise manner would
9 have been preferred to the approach taken, but with our
10 current systems not being Y2K compliant, we did not have
11 that option. Making ADAMS available to the public presented
12 a number of challenges. Unlike systems like NUDOCS and BRS,
13 which use a mainframe design model, where all the software
14 is on one computer, ADAMS is based on a more contemporary
15 design that uses both a back-end computer, the server, and a
16 desktop computer, the client.
17 While NRC has standard desktop configurations,
18 there is a great variety of desktop configurations across
19 our public stakeholders. ADAMS deployment within NRC places
20 a considerable amount of software on the desktop. This
21 deployment approach is not feasible for our stakeholder
22 population.
23 Our solution requires a one-time download of the
24 CITRIX software. Initially, the download of CITRIX software
25 did cause some issues, but we have taken steps to
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1 significantly simplify the download process.
2 The second issue that has surfaced is that ADAMS
3 appears to the public as it appears to our internal users,
4 as a Windows-based application, as compared to a browser-
5 based application. While the public may be familiar with
6 navigating the web, there is a learning curve to hurdle in
7 navigating ADAMS. To assist our public stakeholders, we are
8 training the public document room staff to provide phone
9 support and have ready access to tier two technical support
10 here at headquarters.
11 We also offer one-on-one training sessions at the
12 PDR. However, we do not make house calls, at least not yet.
13 Let me touch on fire walls. Organizations would
14 generally pass all incoming and outgoing electronic
15 communications through a fire wall. The job of the fire
16 wall computer is to ensure that undesired transmissions do
17 not flow either into or out of the organization. For
18 example, hacker attacks.
19 Access to ADAMS requires the stakeholder fire
20 walls to update some specific access code information. Once
21 we have gotten in touch with the right people in the
22 stakeholder organization, we have been successful in helping
23 them resolve the fire wall issue, in all but one case. In
24 addition, stakeholders can choose to establish a direct
25 access link to ADAMS and bypass their fire wall.
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1 Within the NRC, we had hoped that as ADAMS user
2 training completed this summer and in September and October,
3 users would work with ADAMS and gain additional experience
4 and comfort and also help flesh out issues that may have
5 slipped through the development process. ADAMS usage
6 remained low into December.
7 In anticipation of a significant degraded demand
8 for user assistance than originally planned for, we expanded
9 the staffing of our help desk and offered an expert user
10 program. We have some eight graduates of this program to
11 date.
12 Templates provide guidance to users on what
13 information about documents should be entered into ADAMS,
14 into ADAMS document profiles. This is document meta data.
15 By having documents properly profiled, future document
16 searches will have significantly better odds of finding all
17 search relevant documents.
18 Our step-wise implementation program requires
19 completed templates prior to stakeholder entry of documents
20 into ADAMS.
21 Foil 18, please.
22 This foil highlights the ADAMS implementation
23 plan. As templates are completed, staff enters documents
24 into ADAMS and OCIO will start capturing new categories of
25 documents that were previously not entered into our document
26
1 management system; for example, budget documents and
2 contract files.
3 The regions and headquartered offices will start
4 using the auxiliary document capture stations to enter
5 documents as experience is gained.
6 In the February-March timeframe, we turn on ADAMS'
7 electronic distribution capabilities and on March 31, we
8 will terminate paper record-keeping.
9 I would now like to turn to the final two agenda
10 items, performance and plans.
11 Foil 19, please.
12 We have a number of -- this next foil will discuss
13 some of our service levels. We have a number of service
14 level targets or performance targets in place today. A few
15 examples are shown here. The last metric reflects the
16 results of a nationwide study that show the average level of
17 staff satisfaction with access to information. The average
18 rating across a number of organizations was 3.6, of a
19 possible high score of five. We used the same survey
20 instrument about 18 months ago and scored a 3.4. We were
21 slightly under average at that time.
22 After the RISE project and some other
23 improvements, we believe we have helped up our ratings. We
24 plan to do a second survey later this year.
25 Foil 20.
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1 The PBPM model is consistent with our view that
2 any service organization, to be successful, needs to have in
3 place a statement of goals and an effective measurement
4 system to provide feedback to the organization on its
5 performance, or, put another way, if you don't know where
6 you are going, you may not get there.
7 Foil 21, please.
8 This year, in our performance plan, we will fill
9 the gaps in our service level targets and this is consistent
10 with recommendations from the Andersen study. We also want
11 to further engage our customers as we establish new and
12 revisit existing service level targets.
13 We want to move in the direction of establishing
14 service level agreements with our customers to ensure that
15 the services provided are at a level consistent with their
16 needs. We do not want to provide a Cadillac when a Chevy
17 will do the job just fine.
18 As mentioned earlier, as we move forward with our
19 recontracting programs, we want to benchmark our costs as a
20 service provider with other Federal agencies and with the
21 private sector. Our goal is to be effective by delivering
22 the right services and to be efficient by delivering the
23 services at a competitive price.
24 Foil 22, please.
25 Areas that we will be focusing on over the next
28
1 several years include closing the IT skill gap. This
2 includes curbing the resistance by staff to adopt
3 information technology as a valued resource and to help
4 staff understand how they can more fully use existing and
5 new application capabilities to improve their efficiencies,
6 coupling IT planning and PBPM.
7 As offices re-baseline their goals and strategies,
8 we believe there is an opportunity to revisit application
9 portfolios and establish three to five-year forward plans
10 for how IT can be used to affect the effectiveness and
11 efficiency of offices.
12 Providing the necessary infrastructure. Our goal
13 is to provide the agency the necessary infrastructure, what
14 is required, when required, at a competitive price.
15 Enabling electronic commerce. Digital
16 authentication is a leading-edge technology today, but in
17 two or three years, we will be doing business with our
18 stakeholders and internally much differently than we do it
19 today because of it.
20 Finally, improving public confidence through
21 information accessibility. We believe the web and ADAMS
22 will play a significant role for the NRC in achieving its
23 goals to improve public confidence.
24 Foil 23, please.
25 Our vision is to be a valued partner with program
29
1 and support offices in supporting them in their goals, in
2 their goals of maintaining safety, increasing public
3 confidence, improving our efficiency and effectiveness, and
4 reducing unnecessary burden.
5 Next foil, please.
6 In summary, we are not an island. We respond to
7 business and technology drivers. Stakeholder input is vital
8 to our success. We strive to be efficient and effective as
9 a service provider and as a change agent and we have a clear
10 focus and vision, and that is to be a valued partner.
11 I thank you for your attention and we'll be happy
12 to answer any questions, if we complied with the time limit.
13 CHAIRMAN MESERVE: You have. Thank you very much.
14 You were right on schedule.
15 You indicated that the web site, even though
16 you're in the process of seeking to update and improve it,
17 is one that is very heavily used, with a lot of hits and a
18 lot of interest from the public.
19 Could you say something about the anticipated
20 intersection of ADAMS with the web site in the sense of is
21 it the expectation that over time, that ADAMS becomes the
22 vehicle whereby the public gains access to information?
23 What is the plan with regard to public access to information
24 with regard to documents that may -- which, of course, are
25 available on our web site today?
30
1 Is that going to be continued and what is the game
2 plan?
3 MR. REITER: Let me give you an answer and then
4 let me ask Lynn to further elaborate on it. There are three
5 ways today in which the public can access NRC information.
6 One is through the public document room and people will
7 continue to use that and people who are not comfortable with
8 computing technology, who don't have access to computing
9 technology or the web, would have access to the PDR, as they
10 have had in the past.
11 The web is a convenient vehicle for people to
12 access and it's something that people are growing more and
13 more accustomed to using and work with and I think that the
14 NRC will continue to use the web as a vehicle of
15 communicating information to the public at some level.
16 ADAMS is a very in-depth vehicle for looking at
17 documents, publicly available documents that the agency has
18 dealt with, and it will contain the full history of the
19 agency's documents over time, which would not be available
20 on the web.
21 So I think offices would have a decision to make
22 as to whether they want to put documents -- what the -- all
23 documents would be in ADAMS, but they would have a decision
24 to make whether they feel that that the public would benefit
25 from seeing, having access, even for a short period of time,
31
1 of some of their documents over the web.
2 Lynn, would you add anything to that?
3 MS. SCATTOLINI: To give you an idea of the
4 difference between the web and ADAMS, on the web today, OCIO
5 prepares and posts a lot of the core documents that go up on
6 the web. The offices also post some on their own.
7 We currently have seven FTE that prepare documents
8 -- about 1,100 documents a year, versus ADAMS, we make
9 routinely available over 57,000 documents a year.
10 So we place into ADAMS and make publicly available
11 in about six days, but we post on the web in a year's period
12 of time.
13 I envision and our strategy is to continue with a
14 three-part public information dissemination strategy, those
15 three parts being the PDR, the web and ADAMS. The reason
16 for the three parts is that each of them have different
17 capabilities, provide different functionality to the public,
18 and serve different audiences.
19 What we would like to do is get to the point where
20 you put a document in ADAMS and it is not so labor intensive
21 to take the subset of information that we want to place on
22 the web and place it on the web. FILENET does have a web
23 publishing software package that we're going to be
24 evaluating in the future.
25 CHAIRMAN MESERVE: Let me say I think that's going
32
1 to be very important, because for the typical user, who is
2 very familiar with browser technology and that's how they're
3 finding a lot of information today, and, as you indicated,
4 ADAMS is this client-server relationship, runs as a Windows
5 application, which is going to be less familiar.
6 You've got to anticipate that it's going to be the
7 highly involved member of the public or stakeholder who is
8 going to be most interested in ADAMS. And for the vast bulk
9 of people who are probably looking for information about
10 sort of what's going on, that the web is going to be their
11 primary point of access.
12 MR. REITER: And let me comment that in looking
13 down the road in the future several years, I would imagine
14 that FILENET, the vendor of the base ADAMS document will
15 move over to a web-based interface. This is what many
16 software organizations are doing today, because that is
17 becoming the dominant user interface of choice.
18 But for a long time, for 30 years, we had a
19 mainframe computer paradigm and then we went to client
20 server and that's lasted through the '90s. The transition
21 is clear and people will migrate over to web-based. As new
22 releases of the product become available, then in time we
23 can also look at shifting ADAMS over to that web-based
24 interface.
25 MS. SCATTOLINI: I'd just like to make one other
33
1 remark. I know many people have wondered why we have the
2 public access version to ADAMS as a document management
3 system, why don't we just place all of those documents on
4 NRC's web page.
5 Setting aside the resource considerations, which
6 would be considerable, the functionality that the public has
7 had through BRS for 25 years simply cannot be provided
8 through the web. You can do a couple of things with our web
9 page very well. You can access collections and you can do
10 full text searches.
11 But what you cannot do is it does not store meta
12 data. It does not store information about the author. You
13 cannot -- for example, the report number, you cannot
14 dynamically do searches of different fields of information.
15 You cannot do date range searches. You can't sort. You
16 can't do safe searches. You can't create bibliographies.
17 All of this functionality is the functionality
18 that we have provided to the public through the
19 bibliographic, through the BRS for over 20 years.
20 So we're in a position today where a web -- using
21 NRC's existing web and the product suite that FILENET has
22 will not satisfy the functionality that we have provided to
23 the public. We're certainly anticipating that FILENET, as a
24 product leader, will introduce some more robust technology
25 for us to use in the future.
34
1 CHAIRMAN MESERVE: Thank you. Let me turn to my
2 colleagues. Nils?
3 COMMISSIONER DIAZ: You see, I think I kind of
4 agree with the fact that you are not an island. Seems to me
5 like you are a nuclear power battleship going across the
6 waters and we're trying to determine the direction that
7 you're going and we want to make sure that we are very clear
8 that we are aware of that direction, and I think this
9 meeting is important.
10 At times, I must confess that I have less of a --
11 there is a Navy word that some people realize that I use.
12 I'm not cognizant of all of the things that you do. It's a
13 little more than being aware.
14 In this sense, I just want to say that there is a
15 time in which we really need to have more frequent and
16 current know-how of what directions the Office of the CIO is
17 going. I seem to be missing this, and it's probably my
18 fault. It's probably not yours.
19 But I don't get the same feeling of comfort where
20 the CIO is going as I get with other offices. I think
21 that's probably the way the system developed, it may be my
22 own problem.
23 But I just wanted to state that I do believe it is
24 important that the Commission does get a clear direction of
25 where the ship is going and where it's stopping and where
35
1 it's emptying its bilge and when it's sending airplanes on
2 search and destroy missions and whether the communications
3 are there.
4 So it's a very active system, as you very well
5 know, and that activity, I think, sometimes needs to be
6 better known.
7 Having said that, I just have some very particular
8 questions. You covered how you deal with stakeholders. I
9 used to remember when people called the people that were
10 dependent on them, customers; of course, you try to avoid
11 that work, because they might not be customers in this
12 agency.
13 But I just wanted to really hear from you, Mr.
14 Reiter, what is the real deep down level of interaction
15 between your office and the other statutory offices in the
16 region? Is this something that happens on a day-to-day
17 basis? Is there a problem of insularity, no problems?
18 I need to know, because we hear different things
19 from different places. I'd just like you to come out and
20 say what efforts are made to avoid precisely being not an
21 island, but a transatlantic ship going in a certain
22 direction.
23 MR. REITER: I think it's critically important for
24 the office of the OCIO to maintain, to establish and
25 maintain very close working relationships with its
36
1 stakeholders, which is terminology I've picked up since I've
2 been here actually. You used to call those people
3 customers.
4 COMMISSIONER DIAZ: Yes. We used to call those
5 customers, I realize that.
6 MR. REITER: And we do it and I think -- and I
7 also agree with your first comment about improving
8 communications, which gives me the opportunity to -- we've
9 recently issued a stakeholder report and attempt to do that,
10 and I think here also we have to do more.
11 We have, through the ITBC, the Information
12 Technology Business Council, that forum meets on a regular
13 basis and that forum is chaired by our stakeholders, by our
14 customers, and that presents the forum to look at both
15 significant activities that are going on today, but also the
16 programs that are going to affect change in the course that
17 we may be taking. So we get their input.
18 Depending on the nature, the magnitude of the
19 particular effort, we would also take that to the EC. So if
20 there are significant programs, we would bring it up to the
21 EC.
22 As part of the conversation with the ITBC, the
23 regions are involved, and I mentioned Bruce Mallett from
24 Region II is Deputy Chair and he will be Chair, which we
25 were very happy about because we thought it would give the
37
1 regions an even more significant role in the entire process.
2 When we get to implementing agency-wide
3 applications, which we've been doing quite a bit now with
4 ADAMS, with the RISE program, we depend on working closely
5 with the regions or the TTC staff in order to make those
6 things happen.
7 So we have those dialogues and conversations more
8 on an ongoing daily basis, as the programs may require it.
9 Through the stakeholder report and through
10 opportunities such as this briefing, and I think more
11 frequent occasions would also be good, we would want to
12 communicate with the community where we see directions
13 going.
14 But on the one hand, I think we serve as the
15 translators of technology that is taking place in the
16 outside world and what it means to NRC, how it might be
17 brought into NRC, and that will come down to a business
18 decision as to whether NRC wants to bring it in or not.
19 On the other hand, with the changes that are going
20 on within the program and support offices, with their goals
21 and strategies as they refresh this, I think we need to
22 encourage them and work with them to take a look at their
23 existing application portfolios and see the goodness of fit,
24 and there are formal methods that can be brought to the
25 table to help organizations do this.
38
1 I think by these vehicles, the center of our
2 activity is always around our stakeholder. We look to them
3 for guidance.
4 COMMISSIONER DIAZ: Following on that. As someone
5 badly needing IT training, I mean, I'm so obsolete right now
6 that my grandson beats me systematically, and that's not
7 pleasant, because he brags about it.
8 I see, of course, there is a sea of change and it
9 never ends. It continues to come and it continues sometimes
10 to accelerate. I think it's also important for an
11 organization that controls information technology in this
12 agency to have some stop points, points in which people can
13 feel comfortable with what they are doing before going to
14 the next step.
15 Frequently, I get to my computer and realize that
16 somebody has just been there and changed something and then
17 I can't do what I was doing the day before. I'm sure I'm
18 not alone in this area and I am obviously not a heavy user.
19 But in your plans, have you looked at what I will
20 call stop platforms, areas in which you will stay and say we
21 will consolidate this and, yes, we'll see all the rest of
22 the good things that are coming, we'll factor them in? How
23 is that playing out?
24 MR. REITER: I think, again, you raise a very
25 important point and it certainly impacts customer
39
1 satisfaction, because customers aren't satisfied if things
2 they were doing yesterday they're not able to do today
3 without being given advice about that and trying to given an
4 understanding of why the change is going to have some
5 benefit or some particular need.
6 We are focusing, we have additional focus within
7 our help desk area in terms of improving customer
8 satisfaction, measuring our service levels, communicating
9 change to our customers before it happens, trying to make
10 these changes known up front. And we do have to make
11 changes, because our vendors, our software vendors are
12 giving us products and, in time, they stop supporting what
13 we have unless we stay current with them.
14 So we do have to move forward. But we also make
15 efforts to try to bundle these changes, so that we actually
16 minimize the number of changes that we would make to the
17 user population, and ADAMS is an example where we're also
18 doing that, because as we've been bringing ADAMS on-stream
19 and there have been requests for enhancements and changes,
20 we're putting these all together and then we'll come out
21 with a release model for ADAMS, which is the general
22 approach that we would like to follow in moving forward with
23 technology.
24 It's a more effective way of doing it and also
25 diminishes, decreases the burden on our customers or
40
1 stakeholders.
2 COMMISSIONER DIAZ: Thank you.
3 CHAIRMAN MESERVE: Mr. Merrifield.
4 COMMISSIONER MERRIFIELD: First off, I want to say
5 that I've had the pleasure of just being in an all-hands
6 meeting CIO's office, which I thought was a great
7 opportunity to meet some of the CIO staff and learn a little
8 bit about some of the things that are important to them and
9 some of the things they're doing.
10 I've also had a chance to tour and meet many of
11 the staff individually, which has been a real pleasure. As
12 we talk about all the computer issues here today, we
13 shouldn't forget that among the CIO staff, and I've toured
14 there, some folks down in the basement of this building who
15 do a terrific job and should certainly be recognized for the
16 hard work that they do in the CIO staff, as well.
17 MR. REITER: Thank you.
18 COMMISSIONER MERRIFIELD: I want to -- it's
19 interesting. We talk -- you mentioned the issue of being an
20 island and the issue of communication. Commissioner Diaz
21 talked about being cognizant of what you're doing, and I
22 certainly have been trying to become more aware of what
23 you've been doing, as well.
24 When I met with your staff, one of the things I
25 mentioned is I think there is somewhat of a black box
41
1 mentality out there, that some among the Commission, and I
2 would include myself in that regard, think that many of the
3 things that you do are in that black box, and so we don't
4 have quite as good an example of it.
5 I think also in that regard that there are areas
6 where -- and there may be some concern among the staff of
7 your putting new things out there and why are we moving
8 forward, why do we have to do something different.
9 I think a classic example of that was today. I've
10 sat through I don't know how many Commission meetings since
11 I've been on board here for a year and a half. You used the
12 word foil for the slides. Every other presentation we have
13 ever had in this Commission has been a slide. Today you
14 used the word foil, a new and different term that I,
15 frankly, have never heard before.
16 So I think that's an example of some of the
17 reaction. So I lay that for your thought.
18 Let me get into some questions. I'll try to move
19 quickly. I've got some areas I want to explore and I
20 certainly apologize to my fellow Commissioners for what I've
21 got here.
22 The first one is ADAMS. We have received a number
23 of complaints about fire wall issues from a variety of our
24 stakeholders out there. I guess a couple of different
25 things I want to explore.
42
1 One, why was this a surprise to our stakeholders?
2 Why didn't you know ahead of time that this was going to be
3 a problem?
4 Two, are there any other similar issues that we
5 need to resolve immediately to make the system more
6 available to people on the outside who use it? Three, what
7 lessons have we learned from this? How can we avoid this in
8 the future?
9 If you could touch on those briefly.
10 MR. REITER: Let me touch on some and then let me
11 ask Jim Shields to touch on some. I think the point that
12 you raise about why we didn't give the -- did we know about
13 the fire wall issue before the roll-out of ADAMS. I would
14 have to say that we should have been able to predict that
15 there would have been a fire wall for our stakeholders. We
16 deal with that issue all the time within our own fire wall
17 and security services.
18 We could have -- and I think that's a lesson
19 learned, that's one of the lessons learned -- been more
20 proactive in that arena.
21 In terms of other items such as the fire wall that
22 would affect the public stakeholders, I don't know that I'm
23 aware of any.
24 COMMISSIONER MERRIFIELD: What about lessons
25 learned? Any other lessons learned from this?
43
1 MR. REITER: Well, with ADAMS, as with all our
2 projects, we're going to go through -- just let me mention
3 that as part of our overall CPIC process, we will go through
4 a lessons learned after a period, sometime after the
5 production roll-out of the application is completed.
6 Lessons learned. Lynn, is there anything that you
7 would reflect on at this time?
8 MS. SCATTOLINI: Specifically with regard to
9 public access?
10 COMMISSIONER MERRIFIELD: To the roll-out of ADAMS
11 as it relates to public access, or if you want to broaden
12 that to issues associated with staff use of that system.
13 MS. SCATTOLINI: Well, we're in the heat of
14 implementation now, so we'll be able to do a more objective
15 analysis in the future, as we're required to do under the
16 CPIC six months after implementation, formal lessons
17 learned.
18 COMMISSIONER MERRIFIELD: Let me interrupt, maybe
19 in the heat of battle. I'm willing, if it's easier for you
20 to defer on that, I think down the line, perhaps coming
21 back, we asked for lessons learned from NRR, from NMSS. If
22 you want to come back later on with a series of lessons
23 learned, I'm certainly willing to --
24 MS. SCATTOLINI: We'd be pleased to do that.
25 There are a couple of things I could remark on now.
44
1 COMMISSIONER MERRIFIELD: Okay.
2 MS. SCATTOLINI: One is with regard to ADAMS
3 training. We developed a training program, essentially the
4 same training program for all NRC staff people. We assumed
5 a certain level of baseline level of skill among the NRC
6 staff and it became apparent when people came into the
7 classroom that there is considerable variability among the
8 NRC staff.
9 Some people went into the classroom and had never
10 used a mouse and really struggled with the very most basic
11 things. So when I got the evaluations back each day from
12 training, I saw either one -- mostly one of two things;
13 either the course is too slow or the course is too fast.
14 So we just -- we just were not aware of the range
15 of variability among the staff and if I had been aware, I
16 would have structured the program differently.
17 As a result of that, HR has developed some truly
18 more basic IT training for people, which, in retrospect, we
19 would have had as a prerequisite for the ADAMS training. I
20 think as a whole, the training program would have been more
21 successful if we had done that.
22 So that's one lessons learned that other
23 applications that -- other offices that are sponsoring
24 applications, like the HR, human resources application, and
25 STARFIRE, the financial management system, they can benefit
45
1 from that insight.
2 COMMISSIONER MERRIFIELD: Let me move on. I want
3 to talk a little bit about our web site. I know we've
4 received a lot of plaudits for our web site and the vast
5 volume of information it contains.
6 As a user, call me a stakeholder, if you may, I
7 found that there are -- while there is a terrific amount of
8 information there, it's not the easiest system to use, and
9 there are many other agencies out there that have web sites
10 that I think are areas we could borrow from. I think there
11 are other agencies and things we can learn.
12 I know I mentioned to the staff that I think we
13 ought to reach out, researchers, teachers, scientists,
14 professors and others who are users to get their input. I'm
15 wondering how you're going to go about doing this, if you're
16 intending to do it, actually. I guess if you're intending
17 to do it and if so, how, workshops or other ways of
18 benchmarking ourselves to make sure that we've got as good a
19 web site as any other government agency.
20 MR. REITER: Let me ask Fran to respond to your
21 question.
22 MS. GOLDBERG: Well, Commissioner Merrifield, I
23 certainly agree with your observations about our web site
24 and your observations about our need to look at best
25 practices elsewhere.
46
1 I am, as you know, acting Director of IMD and one
2 of the things I was very interested in looking at when I
3 came to this job was the web site.
4 It is my goal, and I have communicated this to our
5 web staff, that I'd like our web site to be in the top ten
6 web sites that are cited in the next year when Federal
7 Computer Week comes out with their list of top ten Federal
8 web sites.
9 One of the things we are going to do in order to
10 do that is to go and look at and review what those sites
11 have that make them the top ten web sites that we perhaps
12 don't have.
13 We're doing a lot of other things, as well. We
14 are -- we have established a multidisciplinary web team that
15 is composed of our graphics people, our editorial staff and
16 our web staff, and they are going -- they are becoming much
17 more active in the web community. They are becoming more
18 active in both the Federal intranet roundtable. We're going
19 to be hosting a meeting of that next month.
20 They are also going to be more active in taking
21 advantage of some of the lessons learned in the Federal Web
22 Consortium. We are going to be involving both internal and
23 external stakeholders in our web redesign projects.
24 You had raised a very good point, that we need to
25 look at not just people who are most interested
47
1 stakeholders, but those who are, A, either experts in using
2 the web in other disciplines, such as the library community,
3 as well as kind of the sort of general member of the public,
4 perhaps students, others who may be surfing the web, and how
5 are they going to find out about what NRC does. If they hit
6 our web site, will they be able to find things, will they be
7 able to cut through the jargon that our stakeholders are
8 very familiar with, and get right to the information that is
9 useful.
10 So we are very much pursuing the recommendations
11 of the Commission and we will be giving you a progress
12 report on February 15.
13 COMMISSIONER MERRIFIELD: I think our current web
14 site does a good job providing information. I think we'd do
15 a better job of providing definition of the identity in the
16 agency and a more active communications role. I'm glad
17 you're exploring that.
18 My next question relates to the Arthur Andersen
19 report regarding their assessment of our support functions,
20 and I want to read a little bit from that, recommendation
21 for the Office of the CIO, number two, define the success
22 criteria for services provided from the OCIO support
23 function to the agency.
24 There are no commonly agreed on success criteria
25 for IT support services. There is a lack of strong focus on
48
1 a consumer/supplier relationship between the CIO and the NRC
2 offices and programs. Roles and responsibilities between
3 the OCIO and the contractor's offices, regions and programs
4 are unclear.
5 Users complain about disruptions and do not always
6 understand whom to call when they have a problem. Determine
7 appropriate success criteria will require that the OCIO
8 maintain an agency perspective, while working to meet
9 specific user requirements and balancing potentially
10 conflicting expectations of various users.
11 Also, the benefits and costs of user expectations
12 need to be considered and discussed with the users.
13 Can you talk about how you're responding to the
14 recommendations of the Arthur Andersen report, please?
15 MR. REITER: I think the Andersen report makes
16 some good observations and made some good comments. We
17 don't necessarily agree with all of their observations.
18 An area that I mentioned during my presentation
19 was what we do in terms of service level targets and any
20 service organization, we believe, should have some goal for
21 the service that it's offering. When you go from service
22 level target to the next step, which we could call a service
23 level agreement, really the service organization is working
24 with its customers to come to an agreement on what is an
25 appropriate level of service that should be offered.
49
1 So for example, if a desktop needs to be serviced,
2 how long should it take the technician to get to the
3 desktop, as an example, or if we want to have -- and there
4 is a cost associated with that. If you want somebody to be
5 there in two hours, it's going to cost you a dime, and if
6 you want somebody to be there in four hours, it will cost
7 you a nickel. So you can work those kind of agreements, as
8 well.
9 There are other examples. We have standard
10 software on our desktops and if everybody had the same
11 software on their desktop, it would make our job and our
12 costs would be less to take care of the desktop environment.
13 People who need to put additional software, for whatever
14 reason, onto their desktop and want to have support for that
15 environment, that adds an extra burden to us; so should we
16 consider some type of service level agreement and some kind
17 of cost structure that would reflect that.
18 In terms of the -- so one of the goals that we
19 have this year and one of the programs that we will be
20 following up on is following through on what we currently
21 have in place, and I think we have quite a bit in place in
22 terms of service level targets and seeing where we need to
23 extend those and seeing where it would make sense to go to a
24 service level agreement approach.
25 Also, in the contracting efforts that we're doing
50
1 for our services, we're going to look at something called
2 seat management, and this is something that's comparable to
3 out-sourcing, in a way. What seat management says is that
4 you have a desktop, and what does the individual pay for
5 that desktop on an annual basis and for all the services
6 that are required in back of that desktop. We provide those
7 services and we use contractors and there are some
8 alternative vehicles available that we will be looking at as
9 part of our study this year to assess what would be most
10 appropriate.
11 The comment on unclear roles and responsibilities,
12 and I think the specific comment was referring to
13 headquarters, OCIO and what goes on in the regions. And
14 we're not comfortable that that is, in fact, the case.
15 While the regional offices provide services that are very
16 similar to our offices, they provide it for their local
17 populations, things that we can't do for them, and we work
18 in conjunction with them in terms of our standards and
19 seeing that there is a consistency over there.
20 But one of the things that we do plan to do as a
21 follow-on to the Andersen recommendations is look at our
22 various service offerings, look at which organizations would
23 be most appropriate to provide those services, and see if we
24 do see any overlap between what is offered through the OCIO
25 organizations and the region organizations.
51
1 COMMISSIONER MERRIFIELD: As part of that, as a
2 follow-up, you define your role as being on the leading edge
3 of understanding the technology and being able to provide
4 that to different elements within the agency to help them
5 resolve some of their problems and provide IT solutions.
6 To what extent -- you know, when you have
7 different portions of the agency that have different IT
8 needs, and everybody in this agency does have different IT
9 needs, how do you prioritize that? How do you decide that a
10 project in Research is more important than a project in NRR?
11 Who provides the overall agency-wide perspective
12 in terms of decision-making in terms of what's important for
13 IT in this agency?
14 MR. REITER: I think there are two things that
15 come to my mind. One, on any given project, if we look at
16 the overall CPIC process, we look to develop a business case
17 for the project and the business case gives us an indication
18 of the dollar incentive to move forward. So that offers a
19 metric for making decisions.
20 The other thing that comes to mind is something
21 that we have recently gone through at the EC level, and that
22 was this past fall, where there were a lot of activities
23 going on, not just within the OCIO arena or in the
24 information technology arena, but across the agency, and we
25 went through and there were competing priorities and it was
52
1 at the EC level that a group was put together to look at
2 what was happening and set priorities and see what we can do
3 to work through those issues.
4 In some cases, for example, the STARFIRE project
5 had to readjust its deployment program to accommodate the
6 overall needs of the agency, and that was addressed at the
7 EC level.
8 COMMISSIONER MERRIFIELD: Mr. Chairman, I have
9 been abusing my privilege. I do have some additional
10 questions, but I should defer to the Chairman.
11 CHAIRMAN MESERVE: We'll go through another round.
12 COMMISSIONER MERRIFIELD: Thank you.
13 CHAIRMAN MESERVE: I'd like to come back to ADAMS
14 for a minute. You had said that when you got to the end of
15 December, that you asked two questions, is the NRC staff
16 ready for ADAMS and is ADAMS ready for the NRC staff.
17 As I look at foil 17 -- incidentally, I have heard
18 that word used before. When I look at foil 17, I see that
19 most of the points you raise are more directed as is the NRC
20 staff ready for ADAMS, in the sense of the need for training
21 and education.
22 Sort of what sort of problems have arisen in terms
23 of whether ADAMS is ready for the NRC and what is the status
24 of our resolution of those problems?
25 MR. REITER: We've been -- let me give a bit of an
53
1 answer and then let me ask Lynn to give an answer on that.
2 As ADAMS has started to get much more intensive
3 use, we have seen some additional problems that have
4 surfaced and we are working with Computer Sciences
5 Corporation to resolve those problems. Some of them are --
6 some of the problems are not that significant and can be
7 readily resolved. Others take a little bit longer.
8 One of the problems that we're having is printing
9 certain types of documents, the time that it takes to print,
10 and that issue is being addressed.
11 The problem that's getting the most attention from
12 us is some of the performance issues against our legacy
13 environment, the legacy file that we keep internal to the
14 NRC, which actually today contains all of the documents that
15 were carried over from the NUDOCS system, which is some two
16 and a half million records.
17 The performance issues that we're seeing over
18 there are being worked through both with Computer Science
19 and FILENET Corporation and there are a number of different
20 solution approaches that are being pursued and we're hopeful
21 we'll get a solution over there shortly.
22 That is not affecting the public access to the
23 system and that's not affecting access to the new documents
24 that we're putting out into ADAMS. In one of the recent
25 network announcements, we indicated that we are able to keep
54
1 the NUDOCS and BRS systems operating for retrieval only
2 purposes and we will continue to do that until we work
3 through these performance issues.
4 Lynn, are there some other areas that you can
5 point to?
6 MS. SCATTOLINI: Yes. There are a number of areas
7 where OCIO had additional work to do with its partners. We
8 set up a structure about two years ago where each office
9 identified -- the office director, regional administrator
10 identified a senior individual on their staff to be their
11 representative and to work with OCIO in a collaborative way
12 on the ADAMS program.
13 We call those office representatives partners. We
14 have been working with the partners fairly intensively over
15 particularly the past six months to come up with business
16 roles that the agency could adopt in order to facilitate
17 moving to this electronic environment, and we've made a lot
18 of progress with regard to those business roles, but we're
19 still refining them.
20 For example, if your office wants to send a
21 document to another office for review, action or
22 concurrence, how do you do that in the ADAMS environment?
23 So we've actually established business rules of how to
24 accomplish that and group-wise e-mail boxes. So that's one
25 area.
55
1 Another area where we have additional work to do
2 is in the policy and procedure area. OCIO developed draft
3 policies and procedures for the ADAMS program in May and
4 since that time, the EC and the partners have made a number
5 of decisions that have to be reflected there. So those are
6 two areas in which we do have additional work.
7 I guess a third area I can mention is search aids
8 and guides. More -- something easier for the staff to use
9 in terms of using the system. They went to the PDC and they
10 had training and they got a user's manual or a user's guide
11 there, and then they had the policies and procedures
12 handbook, which is very large.
13 What we're putting together right now and are
14 going to issue in the beginning of February is what we call
15 a desk reference user's guide and it is going to take the
16 business functions that the agency performs -- for example,
17 concurring in documents, printing documents, distributing
18 documents, signing documents -- and it's going to tell the
19 user step by step, including using pictures, of how to
20 perform that function and exactly what the business rules
21 are at the agency.
22 So that we hope is going to go a long way toward
23 assisting the staff in using the capabilities more
24 effectively.
25 CHAIRMAN MESERVE: Are you on track to have all of
56
1 these issues resolved by the end of March?
2 MS. SCATTOLINI: Yes, we are. The ones that we've
3 mentioned, yes.
4 CHAIRMAN MESERVE: Go ahead.
5 COMMISSIONER DIAZ: I have some very short,
6 specific questions, that only require short answers, so I'll
7 quickly go through it. You talked about the potential
8 vulnerability with the NRC office suite.
9 Do we have a plan? Do we have estimated costs?
10 Are we going to resolve this issue so it will not become a
11 problem for the agency in the very near future?
12 MR. REITER: We have a plan. There is a project
13 underway right now and the project has two phases to it, and
14 the idea is to do a -- is to assess the costs and the
15 benefits and the impact of what we would want to do.
16 The initial phase one is a three-month effort to
17 really just try to get a hand around what the issues might
18 be and that will be reviewed with the ITBC and the EC and if
19 it looks as though we need to go further and do a more
20 detailed in-depth analysis, then we would do that in phase
21 two.
22 But we plan to bring closure to the question this
23 year.
24 COMMISSIONER DIAZ: Some of those issues we
25 probably would like to know about it ahead of time.
57
1 MR. REITER: Certainly.
2 COMMISSIONER DIAZ: We have the FTS-2001 as an
3 issue. What is the projected effect on emergency responses
4 from changing to the implementing FTS-2001? We've got some
5 lines, but --
6 MR. REITER: There will be no effect.
7 COMMISSIONER DIAZ: No effect whatsoever. Zero
8 effect. Okay. And could you tell me what you mean by
9 performance-based contracting?
10 MR. REITER: When there is -- if you have service
11 measures established as part of your contract, for example,
12 I'm going to fix your desktop in four hours and the
13 statistics show that you're fixing desktops in three hours,
14 you're doing better than the contract, then there may be an
15 incentive in there for the contractor.
16 If there is a -- if you're paying for a particular
17 service that the contractor is offering -- for example, our
18 document processing center -- and if the contractor can be
19 effective in reducing the cost of providing that service to
20 us, the contractor can share in the dollars saved from their
21 improvement in the service.
22 COMMISSIONER DIAZ: How about if it goes the other
23 way?
24 MR. REITER: There can be penalties.
25 COMMISSIONER DIAZ: Thank you.
58
1 COMMISSIONER MERRIFIELD: Since I've come to the
2 Commission, there's a couple of things I have a tendency of
3 lecturing on. One of them I did already today regarding
4 acronyms.
5 The second one I want to mention very briefly. I
6 was reading the stakeholder report and there is a statement
7 in here, on page five, that says web-based computing is
8 reducing the cost of ownership by using thin clients at the
9 desktop.
10 As a weight-challenged individual, I'm not certain
11 what thin clients are. But from a plain English
12 perspective, that is not clear to at least this stakeholder
13 what a thin client is. So that's my lecture on that one for
14 the day.
15 In the slides, or whatever one wants to call them,
16 you indicated that one of your goals was to be a world class
17 provider.
18 You want to be a world class provider. I'm not
19 sure what that means and I'm wondering how that impacts the
20 quality, how you're going to measure the quality of your
21 service and who you're going to benchmark that against.
22 The reason I ask that is virtually every nuclear
23 power plant I've been to says it wants to be a world class
24 nuclear power plant and they're not all world class, they're
25 all the same. So how are you going to measure yourself on
59
1 that?
2 MR. REITER: Well, I think what I would refer back
3 to is the sense that we want to identify with our customers
4 the services that they need, give them options on those
5 services, and then we want to be able to provide those
6 services in a cost-competitive way, and there are vehicles,
7 such as benchmarking, which we can judge the competitiveness
8 of us against other organizations in providing services and
9 there are measures that can be applied.
10 In operations, you can take a look at the cost per
11 transaction and you can look at organizations that are
12 providing certain services at the lowest unit cost possible.
13 COMMISSIONER MERRIFIELD: So from a reactor
14 standpoint, we have a set of performance indicators out
15 there. And to be world class, you really had to be in the
16 top ten percent really to sort of make that kind of claim.
17 Is it your goal to set out a series of performance
18 indicators for yourself and say that you -- of all of the
19 different Federal agencies, for example, you're going to be
20 in the top ten percent of the services you provide?
21 MR. REITER: If we take a look at the idea of seat
22 management, where there is a whole bunch of services
23 associated with the cost of maintaining a desktop, the seat,
24 what we would want to be is in the top ten or top ten
25 percent of low-cost seat providers, for whatever services
60
1 are identified behind that seat.
2 COMMISSIONER MERRIFIELD: It's my understanding
3 that you brought in an expert from Microsoft to review ADAMS
4 and what I've been told is that that particular individual
5 may have made some rather critical comments about its
6 capabilities.
7 Is that true? What kind of comments did we
8 receive, if we did have someone from Microsoft in?
9 MR. REITER: I'm not sure that I'm aware of that.
10 Moe, can you --
11 MR. LEVIN: Yes. We brought an expert in from
12 Microsoft to address some of the performance issues on the
13 legacy library and he gave us some technical opinions on how
14 things could be structured at a very low level to improve
15 performance, but that was the only -- anything that could be
16 considered critical that came out of his review, which is
17 what we brought him in for, to help performance.
18 COMMISSIONER MERRIFIELD: Thank you for clarifying
19 that. Mr. Chairman, thank you.
20 CHAIRMAN MESERVE: I'd like to come back to
21 something you've mentioned in two places, that you talked
22 about the skill gap that you have observed as you've gotten
23 into ADAMS. You haven't given us any sense of the magnitude
24 of that problem. You said there are some people who are
25 unfamiliar with using a mouse, which obviously is a severe
61
1 disability for people you expect to use any Windows-based
2 application.
3 I would like to have some sense of how prevalent a
4 problem that is and how much the people who don't have the
5 skills are ones who we're relying on to be able to use
6 computers and whether this is -- the significance of this
7 issue in terms of our capacity to use what is a very
8 expensive infrastructure that we've put in, with the
9 expectation that it's going to provide efficiencies.
10 And if we have an educational problem, it's much
11 broader than ADAMS. It has to do with whether the equipment
12 we put in, at great cost, is really -- the staff has the
13 ability to use.
14 I'd like to have some sense as to how big a
15 problem you think this is and if it is a big problem, what
16 sort of thoughts do you have, in talking with the HR people,
17 as to how we address it.
18 MR. REITER: We do think it's an issue that does
19 need to be addressed. Our sense, and I guess this would be
20 an assertion, is that 20 to 30 percent of the folk who went
21 through the ADAMS training had difficulty because of
22 discomfort or lack of familiarity with basic PC operations
23 or Windows operations.
24 HR has already put in place some additional
25 training programs. I forget specifically what they call it,
62
1 but to start addressing those issues.
2 We think that the agency is moving more and more
3 towards applications such as ADAMS and such as STARFIRE that
4 we'll be expecting the end users to actually have an
5 interaction with those applications, so they'll be
6 interacting with technology or information applications to a
7 greater extent than they may be doing today with their e-
8 mail or with their word processing activities. They'll be
9 working with applications like ADAMS, applications like
10 STARFIRE.
11 The other aspect of that is not only getting over,
12 we think, the basic comfort level of using the technology or
13 the software applications that we have in place, but also
14 being able to go further and using more than just the
15 surface features of those applications to get into them at a
16 deeper level using calendaring techniques or other
17 techniques where you can further increase productivity to
18 get over that hurdle.
19 So we think this is an issue for the agency. We
20 think it's surfaced and I think a lot of people were
21 surprised to see it as we went through the ADAMS training
22 and we think we do have to do work to actually be able to
23 answer your question in a quantitative sense. We're really
24 not able to do that today.
25 So we have assessments from the experiences,
63
1 largely stemming from ADAMS, which actions are being taken
2 on, but we think it's an area that needs to be pursued and
3 that we will be pursuing with HR.
4 CHAIRMAN MESERVE: I would urge you to do that.
5 Let me turn to my colleagues and see if they have any final
6 questions.
7 COMMISSIONER MERRIFIELD: I actually do have one
8 final one. I was wondering if you could just explain a
9 little bit the process that we went to select STARFIRE and
10 the -- I know we've had some issues with the financial
11 planning portions of that system.
12 MR. REITER: The process --
13 COMMISSIONER MERRIFIELD: That we used to select
14 STARFIRE.
15 MR. REITER: The software packages? Jesse, can
16 you?
17 MR. CLOUD: STARFIRE did participate in the
18 planning investment control process. They prepared a
19 business case in which they summarized the benefits that
20 they saw coming from STARFIRE and provided a cost estimate.
21 We continue to monitor the progress of STARFIRE.
22 As a matter of fact, I think it's been one of the successes
23 of the CPIC process that not only in the selection process,
24 but after the program is operational, as a monitoring
25 process, in which the project manager has to report the
64
1 status of his project and the operational problems with
2 STARFIRE were caught quite early.
3 Without a monitoring process like that, and other
4 agencies sometimes with problems that have gone on for a
5 long, long time. And I see the other Jesse has something to
6 say.
7 MR. FUNCHES: I'm Jesse Funches, for the reporter.
8 The process we used to select STARFIRE, as Jesse said, was
9 that we did the CPIC analysis and then we went out and asked
10 for bids from the schedule that was put together for the
11 financial system.
12 COMMISSIONER MERRIFIELD: Who put together that
13 schedule?
14 MR. FUNCHES: The schedule was put together by
15 GSA, based on companies that had qualified under the joint
16 financial management improvement program, as having valid
17 financial systems.
18 So those systems were verified by that
19 organization as being capable of performing the basic
20 financial function.
21 One of the issues there was that certification, if
22 you will, was not probably thorough as it could have been
23 and they have modified that and recertified all of the
24 systems.
25 So we went and I believe we selected at least
65
1 three vendors or we offered to I think five and three
2 vendors made proposals. Then we went through the normal
3 contracting process to select a vendor for the project.
4 So it was based on looking at the vendors, asking
5 for bids, looking at the bids and then making a selection.
6 COMMISSIONER MERRIFIELD: Was the selection made
7 by the EC?
8 MR. FUNCHES: The selection, no. The selection
9 was made by -- I was eventually the selection official, but
10 we had a panel of people that were comprised of my staff,
11 from the program offices, that reviewed the systems and then
12 made a recommendation.
13 COMMISSIONER MERRIFIELD: Thank you.
14 CHAIRMAN MESERVE: Good. I would like to thank
15 you all. This was a very informative and very helpful
16 briefing for us. You have a very important function here at
17 the NRC and we very much appreciate your work. So thank you
18 very much.
19 With that, we're adjourned.
20 [Whereupon, at 11:32 a.m., the meeting was
21 concluded.]
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