NIH Federated Identity Service – Program Managers:  Valerie Wampler and Debbi Bucci

 

NIH established the first federated Share Point Service in the US to allow non-NIH organizations who are authorized by NIH research, grants, or administrative groups to access NIH using their own (users) organization credentials for authentication.  This simplifies collaboration among health and university entities.  Through this service, NIH accepts the same user name, password, or other personal identification already authenticated by the user’s own organization. Different user scenarios identified for business needs at NIH include cross-domain, web-based single sign-on; cross-domain user account provisioning; cross-domain entitlement management; and cross-domain user attribute exchange (point-to-point, uni- or bilateral, and many-to-many). Federated Identity Service’s adherence to widely accepted, shared principles creates a high level of portability, so that the service is not bound to any specific protocol, technology, implementation, or vendor. The goal is to expand the service to use the Federal Bridge (still in the development stage) for credentialing acceptance between government agencies.

 

 

GSA’s USA.gov Web Best Practices – Program Manager:  Martha Dorris

 

GSA has enhanced this web portal using Web 2.0 tools to facilitate citizen engagement in conversation with the government.  It links to all federal and state and many local government web and home pages.  It has a powerful search engine to crawl > 50m government pages for many different link groupings.  USA.gov is in the forefront of US government use of state-of-the-art technology including Web 2.0 features such as blog, videos, podcasts, RSS feeds, GovDelivery e-mail updates, a gadget gallery, web chat, a mobile web version and social networking features.  There is also a Spanish language version.

 

DOL GovBenefits.gov – Program Manager:  Curtis Turner  

 

DOL developed GovBenefits.gov to be reusable across agencies that are benefit providers to the citizens.  In March 2008, GovBenefits.gov successfully launched http://BEST.ssa.gov as the site’s first Customized Connection.  This collaboration with the SSA has replaced SSA’s existing Benefit Eligibility Screening Tool using the GovBenefts.gov questionnaire functionality.  The new tool screen citizens for 17 different SSA programs and provides them with a list of the Social Security benefits they may be eligible to receive.  This saves SSA resources and saves citizens’ time and effort by making benefit information consistent across government websites.  A Customized Connection site such as SSA BEST contains reusable, “Powered by GovBenefits.gov” extensions that seamlessly add functionality to any website, as exemplified by GovLoans.gov, another e-Government initiative focused on simplifying loan eligibility and determination.  This eliminates redundant government systems, creates exclusive content for the agency customers, decreases management and maintenance costs and saves citizen’s time and effort by making benefit information consistent across government websites.  GovBenefits.gov consistently receives all green ratings on its OMB Performance Scorecard and SSA met their OMB milestones based on the SSA BEST launch.

 

US Army Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance (C4ISR) Single Interface to the Field (SIF) – Program Manager:  LTC Michael Rodriguez

 

The SIF web portal provides 24/7 informational awareness to Army Leadership, the Warfighter, and the field support community on C4ISR products and capabilities.  The portal provides field incident reporting/tracking, field support personnel tracking, Unit Set Fielding data and schedules, technical and training documentation on all C4ISR products.  In the past, there was a matrix of stovepipe support structures in place with each PM utilizing their own help desks, tools, and processes to assist field support and problem resolution.  It was difficult for a Soldier or field support personnel in the field to know exactly where to go for the help they needed on a specific problem or product.  SIF has synchronized the support process leveraging technology to enable commanders, the Warfighter and field support personnel to have 24/7/365 reachback capability.  To date SIF has > 13,000 registered users, has supported a total of 778 Battle Update Briefs and 30 CTC exercises.  There have been 8,500 incident reports.  Best practices include Unit Set fielding model for fielding units and coordination of schedules, ITIL tiered approach, Knowledge Management, and an SIF User Advisor Group to formalize feedback for actioning.  SIF has enabled the breaking down of organizational barriers and collaboration among C4ISR organizations, transforming the way these organizations do business, including strengthening the relationship between the acquisition workforce and the operational Army.

 

AFKN EagleCash Community of Practice (CoP) – Program Manager:  Michael A. Bilbrey

 

The primary goal of the EagleCash program is to support mission readiness and increase safety of Dept of Defense members in combat zones by providing a strategic, benefit-rich alternative to traditional but inefficient, high risk, and costly U.S currency. The EagleCash program facilitates the transformation and e-commerce initiatives of the Air Force. The self-help kiosk provides Airmen 24/7 access to their funds in U.S financial institutions, reduces workload at deployed Finance Offices, creates efficiencies in cash management by facilitating the electronic transfer of currency among merchants, cardholders, and financial institutions. The goal of the EagleCash Community of Practice (CoP) that is located on the AFKN network is to provide a collaborative and secure environment using shared information to support the EagleCash program, a secure centralized hub for the exchange of sensitive financial information and daily EagleCash transactional files.  FY 08 measureable savings have been: 

  -- $27M  loaded to the cards at the Kiosks = funds we did not have to transfer within Southwest Asia theater

  -- 367,557 loads at the Kiosks and 4,855 card to card transfers = customers who did not have to come into the Finance Office.  At 15 minutes per transaction this results in a 3,879 manday savings at the Finance Office

  -- Army and Air Force Exchange Service (AAFES) saves 2.5-4% on retail sales by not paying interchange fees to banks.  This equates to more profits and as a result, increased contributions to MWR benefits to Airmen.

 

45^th Space Wing Server Virtualization – Program Manager:  Sheryl Glore

 

Utilizing server virtualization and a cross-site Server Area Network (SAN) spanning 26 miles between Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and Patrick Air Force Base, the 45th Space Wing was able to reduce the number of physical servers by 93% while increasing reliability and redundancy across the enterprise.  Savings were gained by reduced maintenance, hardware replacement, electrical, and HVAC costs of $177,000 annually.  Additionally, the reduced footprint of the data centers is saving $45,000 in UPS and cooling requirements.  The carbon footprint was reduced by 100,000 pounds annually.