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March 2000
Two Federal Agencies Put Images on the Internet
By Russell Letson
In the private sector, technology investments are usually justified by the fiscal bottom line,
but government organizations march to different motivational drummers. Budgets are fixed or
restricted, market share is not an issue and there are rarely any competitors to worry about. Instead,
there is a drive to improve service, to make the most of available resources and to get more bang for
the restricted buck.
The special nature of the public-sector environment also means that government agencies are not
usually anywhere near the bleeding edge of technological innovation. Nevertheless, given half a
chance, they can parlay small beginnings into impressive results. The US Public Health Service and the
Canadian Lands Directorate of the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs are just two agencies that
have combined imaging applications with Web technology to ease distribution and management.
Managing Human Resources Via the Internet
At the Department of Health and Human Services, the Division of Commissioned Personnel of the U.S.
Public Health Service employs some 6,000 health professionals. These commissioned officers are posted
in state and federal departments, non-profit organizations and offices of the World Health
Organization. They're in more than 500 locations in all, yet the division conducts all of its
personnel administration from a central Human Resource Service (HRS) office in Bethesda, MD. Imaging
and Internet technologies are bridging the gaps.
The HRS runs the boards that determine promotions, awards, retirements and billets, and it maintains
the personnel files on which these procedures depend. Until recently, all HRS personnel files were
paper-based and nearly irreplaceable, with the only set kept at the Bethesda offices. While there were
microfilm copies of orders generated at Bethesda, crucial items such as licenses, diplomas,
certificates, awards and evaluations — the things that show an officer's progress and
potential — were not backed up. If lost, the files would have to be reassembled from original
sources.
HRS' Director, Rear Admiral Michael Davidson, and Chief of Personnel Services, Captain Kenneth
Diepold, knew that the records were vulnerable and that they needed a disaster recovery plan. They
opted for a scan-store-retrieve solution that would allow easy conversion and backup of existing
records as well as day-forward addition of new items. But they also saw an opportunity to re-engineer
the Division's procedures and to take advantage of technologies including the Internet.
"The hard part is not to design [a new system] to do the same things that you already
do," says Davidson. "The concept was to start over with the assumption that all files could
be available at all places at all times."
The HRS office wanted to make the files viewable by officers no matter where they worked. They also
wanted to enable parallel processing of various record-dependent actions. Previously, all procedures
that relied on these records were necessarily linear — only one person at a time could use a
file.
The answer was to construct an image-based personnel data system with Web access and distributed
capture capabilities. The late 1998 timing was right since the department's old Wang minicomputer
was being phased out, as part of a Y2K upgrade, in favor of an Oracle DBMS running on NT.
The new system was built with the help of Bethesda-based imaging and workflow specialists DoxSys Inc.
(www.doxsys.com). It combines an NT server and workstations, a RightFax fax server, ViewStar workflow
software from Lucent Technologies, a pair of Fujitsu scanners and a Hewlett Packard optical jukebox.
The backfile conversion effort, which was outsourced to a subcontractor, retained the color-coding
system HRS used to organize file folders by way of barcode separator sheets.
The new HRS Web site allows any officer with an Internet connection, a browser and the proper access
rights to examine his or her personnel folder from anywhere in the world. The file system is set up to
be fed by fax and, eventually, via Web-based electronic submissions. In cases where certificates and
licenses are required, originals must be sent in, verified and scanned and then returned to the
owners.
For the first year, HRS is scanning in certain paper personnel evaluation forms (pre-printed with bar
codes to automate indexing), but Web-based replacements are under development. The goal is to migrate
to a paper-free environment so new officers' files will be entirely electronic from the start.
The first process to be transformed to the new system was the annual promotion review, which
received a workflow makeover. Each year, about a third of the 6,000 officers are eligible for
promotion. Candidates are evaluated by promotion boards made up of outside subject-area experts. The
workflow application starts by automatically choosing the files of all personnel eligible for a given
level of promotion. These are sorted and queued to the appropriate promotion board for review.
The board members themselves come to Bethesda from various locations, so one of the first benefits of
the new system was to allow them to do some preparatory reading via the Web before the board meetings.
Candidates, of course, are able to review their files, submit additional files (as faxes or original
documents) and notify the main office of corrections or omissions.
At HRS offices, the board members hold their meetings in a redesigned boardroom with a workstation and
flat-screen monitor for each evaluator. Instead of passing around paper files, each member can display
any file and zoom in, if need be, for easier reading. The new board review protocols are all
electronic, including scoring, weighting, tie-breakers, etc. Calculations and scoring are automated by
the workflow system with appropriate rules applied.
The benefits of the new system go beyond the safeguarding of records and the streamlining of
procedures. For example, Diepold points out that having records viewable remotely does away with the
perception that "people close to the Beltway have an advantage because they have ready access to
their personnel folders."
Internet collaboration will also foster mentoring in an organization where many postings have only one
or two officers. "The junior officer might be in Anchorage and the senior officer in
Phoenix," Davidson explains. "As they look through the file, the [senior officer] can give
career advice about the next logical step for career advancement."
Davidson adds that accessible files will also encourage the many outside agencies that could use PHS
officers to find the right person. "Program managers looking for someone with particular skills
will be given access to certain parts of files to [find] a suitable person for their professional
needs," he says.
The reinvention of the promotion process has set the direction that Davidson would like to take for
the rest of the department. "We're expanding the [approach] to include all our other board
actions, but the promotion board system was the big one to get out and running," Davidson says.
"We'll learn from that one, and it will be the building block for the rest of them."
Mastering Color and Large-Format Docs Online
Canada's Lands Directorate of the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs has the job of
maintaining records and providing access to distant users. In this case the primary users are the 606
recognized tribes of the First Nations. The records are all files concerning transfer or use of land
on some 2,600 First Nation reserves.
While the recognized First Nations tribes manage their own affairs, it's the job of Jacques
Desrochers, Deputy Registrar of Land Surveys and Imaging, to make sure that all the relevant documents
are stored and available.
The Lands Directorate had used microfilm for about 30 years, but it was not a medium well-suited to
land documents as there are many attachments, including color maps, and no standard paper size.
"Many documents are double sided," Desrochers explains, "so the operator would have to
photocopy the back side of all the pages… Since the paper sizes were not constant, it was very
complex and tedious work. Then we had to make duplicates of these cards for the appropriate regional
and First Nation offices. They would get up to six months behind on the job."
The Lands Directorate migrated to digital imaging in 1993 when they purchased a FileMagic system from
Westbrook Technologies (www.filemagic.com). The system met their requirements to handle multi-page
documents, various paper sizes and a mix of black-and-white and color files. More recently, in January
of 1999, the agency upgraded to Westbrook's Fortis 32-bit document management system and PowerWeb
module, both operating on an Oracle back-end database. Once a document is entered and indexed in
Fortis, it is instantly available through PowerWeb without any special conversion efforts or HTML
coding.
The records exhibit all the messiness and complexity you'd expect of real estate transactions
involving long history of ownership, mapping and land-use documentation. The files stretch back to
1762, and the collection currently holds 250,000 documents averaging 25-50 pages each. New records
continue to come in at a rate of about 1,000 a month.
Since leases now often have environmental or insurance clauses, new documents are even longer.
Desrochers reports that the average is now 80 legal-size pages, and attachments can include all sorts
of auxiliary material such as building floor plans. When the First Nations add new lands to their
reserves, the documents can be very complex, incorporating aerial photographs and/or color-coded
maps. The files need to be available to the First Nations on demand, so the primary distribution
mechanism is now through the PowerWeb module. The tribal offices view the files on an intranet via a
dedicated T1 WAN. Other users also need to work with the land records, but there are concerns about
making First Nations records publicly available to all on the Internet. "We handle requests
from lawyers preparing new transactions and doing title searches," Desrochers explains. For now,
the answer has been to add a fax board so documents can be fax-printed from the system. The
Directorage can also use a Fortis module to provide individual tribes with copies of their records on
CD-ROM.
The complexity of this operation is in the data, not the process. "It's not like an
insurance company, where requests go from department to department," says Desrochers, "so
workflow was not required." Instead, the emphasis is on getting documents into the system and
assuring quality.
Veterans Agency Tests the Waters of Imaging
The Veterans Benefits Administration is buried in paper, and document imaging is the shovel
they are using to dig themselves out. This unit of the Veterans Administration provides benefits to
veterans and their dependents through a claims-filing process, and, says Frank Kush, Project Manager
for the Virtual VBA Initiative, "I guarantee no matter where you go, you will find that our
claims folders are bigger than any you've seen." In fact, they can grow to be more that a
foot thick. Files are extensive because the VBA's role combines some of the most challenging
aspects of an insurance company and a social-welfare agency. In addition to medical and disability
claims, it also administers vocational rehabilitation and a range of pension, educational and survivor
benefits. Thus a veteran's files will typically contain not only medical information from private
doctors and hospitals but also his or her entire military medical history. In addition, there will
often be military personnel history and personal data such as marriage, birth and divorce
certificates. "It's a hodgepodge of paper," says Kush. "Our claims folders can
be from fifty on the very small side to thousands of pieces of paper." The Veteran's
administration had a completely manual system, but when you combine the volume of paper (about 150
million new pieces every year) with the complexity of the decisions that need to be made, you have an
organization ripe for a makeover. That process started when Under Secretary for Benefits Joe Thompson
connected with Highway 1 (www.highway1.org), a Washington-based non-profit consortium that promotes
the strategic adoption of information technology in the public sector. Highway 1 put together an
industry team including Cisco Systems, Computer Science Corp., Eastman Software, IBM, Kodak, Microsoft
and Radian Systems (now a part of Sequoia Software). A Highway 1 project manager worked with staffers
at the Washington, D.C., office of the Veteran's Benefits Administration on a pro-bono
proof-of-concept project.
The concept in question was pretty basic: to remove the paper folders from the users' desktops
and put them into an electronic environment. The pilot project used a number of off-the-shelf products
from team companies: Cisco networking gear, Eastman WorkFolder for Microsoft Exchange, IBM
workstations and servers, Kodak scanners, Microsoft Exchange and Outlook, and Radian capture software.
Kush admits that while imaging is nothing new in the private sector, "it's somewhat new to
government." The pilot project introduced them to a number of classic issues: adjusting business
processes, getting people used to working with images, shuttling between paper and computer, and
"just trying to develop a comfort level with the tools." VBA liked what they learned, and
in January 1999, with the success of the pilot, the agency was able to go to Congress and receive
funding for a national system. VBA bought many of the products Highway 1 recommended, but Kush says
the committed to doing even more extensive testing and process reengineering. "We want to try
to catapult ourselves into modern technology, and we have to be aggressive," he explains. The
agency is building on its experience with the creation of the C&P (Compensation and Pensions)
Systems Service Laboratory, staffed with a cadre of workers from VBA offices of different sizes across
the country, "to really get a sampling of the entire culture." At the lab, they're
examining both technologies and the work process. "It's one thing to scan in a bunch of
paper, but it's another to provide end users with the tools that allow them to move through that
imaging environment as quickly as they could with paper," Kush explains.
The lab is located in the same building as the Washington office, so it can work with live data.
"We're able to take real cases and make real claims decisions," says Kush.
"That's important, because [we're discovering] little intricacies that you
wouldn't get in a test environment, and we're developing lessons-learned and best-practices
documentation."
VBA's next goal is to define the functional requirements of their national system and then
publish a specification by March. The adaptation of document imaging and workflow promises to
transform the agency's internal workings and improve the speed and efficiency with which it
settles claims.
"We did not provide the VBA with revolutionary technology, but we did provide them a revolution
in improved customer service," says Mike Hernon, Highway 1 president.
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