The National Institute of Standards and Technology has begun a multi-year effort to move its paper-based practices online and enable the agency to use electronic signatures.
The first step in the Electronic Approval Project is for NIST to convert nearly 220 paper forms into e-forms. Then, it will automate four business processes by including online routing. These processes--time and attendance approvals, work orders, local travel reimbursement and purchases on government-issued credit cards--are the agency's highest-volume administrative actions. If the automation is successful, NIST may opt to automate its 36 remaining business processes.
NIST will use HandySoft Corp.'s BizFlow 2000, an e-forms and workflow automation software suite, to convert paper-based forms and create automatic electronic routes around its specific business processes.
Because these processes require employee and administrative signatures, NIST will create a public key infrastructure (PKI), designed to guarantee the authenticity of each electronic signature. Using a PKI solution from Entrust Technologies Inc., a Plano, Texas, security software developer, NIST will assign a "public key," or special identifier, to every employee. The public key will authenticate any electronic signature, thus eliminating the need for NIST employees to print out and sign forms.
The agency has three distinct motivations to begin this project, said Richard Quintero, manager of the Electronic Approval Project. First, the agency is participating in the Commerce Department's overarching Digital Department initiative, an effort that seeks to move paper processes online.
Second, NIST hopes the project will give it the practical technical experience it needs to complement its research and development efforts. "We have a computer security division here at NIST developing standards for digital signatures and public key infrastructures," Quintero said. "But the issue is that there is no substitute for practical experience. This is an extremely complicated technological area that's brand new."
Finally, under the Government Paperwork Elimination Act, NIST is required to provide this type of expertise to government as a whole.
Eventually, NIST hopes to deploy the benefits of the Electronic Approval Project to each of its nearly 3,000 employees. For now, the agency will begin by running a 100-person pilot project to iron out flaws in the implementation process. This will also give the agency enough time to make electronic replicas of its various paper forms.
"Once NIST makes this available to all its employees, it is NIST's intent to start letting other people use these automated processes to conduct business with NIST," said Rodger Blevins, vice president for program management at Matcom Corp., the Alexandria, Va., integrator brought on by NIST to help implement the Electronic Approval Project. "This includes researchers, universities, vendors and other Commerce Department bureaus."
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