New Way to Locate Employees—The NIH Enterprise Directory

The NIH Enterprise Directory (NED) is a centrally-coordinated, electronic directory that CIT is developing to maintain accurate, current information for all individuals using NIH services or facilities. When fully implemented, NED will provide individuals and application developers with a single, reliable source of information on those individuals. If you want to know—who works at NIH, what organization they work for, where they work, how they can be contacted, services and facilities they are authorized to use—NED will provide answers. (Only publicly-available information is provided.)

NIH Administrative Officers and their assistants have been using NEDs Web interface to obtain and maintain information since July 2000.

Development of NED

NIH employees and application development will benefit because NED

•	eliminates the need for each application to collect and maintain its own copy of locator information
•	keeps information consistent by automatically updating information in multiple places
•	creates and manages a unique ID for each NIH-affiliated worker that applications can use instead
•	facilitates deregistration or deactivation of services (e.g., card keys, computer accounts, email address, books, telephone directory listing) when individuals leave NIHt
•	improves security and privacy

NED guards against duplicate records by performing a thorough database search to determine if the individual already has a unique 10-digit ID (or UID), before generating one for a person. In developing NED, CIT placed strong emphasis on building a system that would contain more consistent data than found in other NIH databases. For example, all individuals who work in the Clinical Center can be listed by searching for "buildingName = 10" (NED does not recognize "Clinical Center," "Clinical Ctr," or "ACRF").

Connections to Other Systems

NED is designed to connect to other systems for sending and receiving updated information. How will this work when the system is fully implemented? When an individual changes a telephone number in the e-mail system, NED will update its information and send the new number to the NIH telephone operators, the ID badge/cardkey system, the CIT help desk, and other connected systems.

In the near future, NED will be connected to NIHs various payroll systems and will periodically reconcile its data against those systems—automatically adding records for newly hired employees who have not been registered, deleting records of employees who have left NIH, updating the organizational affiliation of employees who have moved to a new IC, and so forth.

As one of the first steps in connecting NED to other systems, NED data is now available to application developers via CITs DB2 server on MVS. For detailed information on how to access it, you can visit the NED Web site or contact TASC.