WASHINGTON, D.C. (December 1, 2009) - Department of the Interior’s (DOI) National Business Center (NBC) has won the Government Open Source Conference 2009 “Excellence Awards for Open Source Business Use in Government” in the Category of “Transparency in Government”. The Award is designed to recognize government employees and/or teams who have made significant accomplishments in the application of Open Source Technology to meet government business or mission requirements. The award was presented to team members of The Project at this year's GOSCON conference held in Washington, DC at the Ronald Reagan Building, November 5, 2009.
The application that captured the GOSCON win for the NBC provides transparency for the Federal procurement intake process. The Acquisition Services Directorate Electronic Servicing Environment (AQD ESE) is an application for AQD contracting officers and program offices to electronically collaborate using Web 2.0 components for the procurement intake process. The application allows program offices to specify their purchasing requirements and collaborate electronically with the contracting officers to produce a solicitation.
The application embodies the industry best practices on collaboration, document management, online forms, and system notifications to clearly indicate status for the procurement action during the intake process. The system provides quick delivery of work requests to Contracting Officers and multiple users that support the intake process to share real-time information. This provides program offices and contracting officer’s clear insight into the procurement intake process and reduces the timeline for procurement.
The NBC along with its private sector partners developed a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) that is also one of the early instances of the Open Source Enterprise Content Management (ECM) application, Alfresco, being run on a mainframe zLinux environment. The team was able to provide a deeper level of integration than commonly used across platforms increasing the security and responsiveness of the application. By using open source products the NBC was able to create a practical business result focused Government 2.0 application that provides transparency to a part of the contracting process that had none before. For additional information please contact Teresa Rivera at Teresa.Rivera@aqd.nbc.gov.
ITD’s AQD ESE contributes to the strategic mission of the organization by reducing cost for agency customers and improving overall operations. Additionally, NBC’s ITD offers a full range of established and audited management processes with their IT support services including: Security Management; Certification and Accreditation (C&A); Change Management; Problem Management; Configuration Management; Customer Relations; Capitol Planning and Investment Control and will soon be rolling out their Cloud Computing Offerings in Fall 2009. Over 75, 000 authorized users are supported by NBC’s ITD systems and applications. Agencies can be confident of outstanding operational standards and excellent customer service when they trust their IT service needs to the NBC.
About the NBC
The NBC is a Shared Services Provider, offering world class business management systems and services to Federal agencies including Finance systems and services, Human Resources and Payroll services, Acquisition services, Appraisal services, Aviation Management services, Information Technology services, Executive Coaching services as well as Administrative Support services to include Drug and Alcohol Testing. For additional information about the NBC please visit, http://www.nbc.gov.