Building the Perfect Portal

he Navy captain, aboard a ship headed for a war zone, sits down at a workstation and logs on. He zooms in on an area of conflict, observing the positions of his fleet and that of the enemy. Based on his analysis of this information, he issues tactical commands, which are transmitted in real time to the appropriate personnel.

Now that he has accomplished his goals for the moment, the captain has time to spare before his next task. First, he checks the status of aircraft and systems down for repair and orders spare parts. Then he signs up for a short online training course to get up to speed on the latest techniques in maintaining Naval aircraft. Before logging off, he takes a few minutes to check on a paycheck deposit, schedule medical appointments, and read the latest Navy news.

That type of real-time multitasking, virtually impossible until recently, is now an everyday occurrence in the Navy, thanks to a comprehensive portal to all of the service's Web-enabled applications. The Navy Marine Corps Portal (NMCP) allows uniformed personnel, contractors and family members to access Naval applications and share information with each other. The pilot project is a result of orders from the vice chief of Naval operations to create a global portal to support the warfighter.

When fully operational-sometime within the next few years, depending on funding-the NMCP will provide access to information in about 350 smaller Navy portals, many of which provide local commands with information specific to their users, such as human resources, local weather and travel updates. Eventually, even larger portals, such as Navy Knowledge Online, which offers training courses, will be incorporated into the Navy-wide portal, says NMCP program manager Terry Howell of the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR).

Initially, the portal's architecture was based on the CleverPath Portal from Computer Associates International Inc. of Islandia, N.Y. After the pilot phase is over, SPAWAR plans to issue a request for proposals this fall for a portal product that, like CleverPath, is built using open standards. This allows officials to continue developing and modifying the portal without being tied to proprietary technology. "We want to see what's out there two years after we started the pilot," Howell says.

REACHING NEW HEIGHTS

The Navy Marine Corps Portal and a handful of other ambitious projects at agencies make one thing crystal clear: The government portal has grown up. From its simple roots as a static compilation of Web pages, today's government portal has made great strides in achieving its ultimate promise-one-stop, secure, easy access to a wide variety of information sources whenever and from wherever the user happens to be.

The path government has taken on its journey to develop comprehensive portals resembles that of industry. Technology experts have spent years learning what works and what doesn't, generally by building less ambitious portals. Some have succeeded in their limited missions, and some haven't. Those lessons, combined with increasingly sophisticated commercial portal products and related technologies, have enabled agencies to make the giant leap toward creating the full-functioning, always-on portals they are developing today.

"There is more knowledge out there on the part of government. They are demanding more intelligence from portals, and we've had to make changes to our products to meet those demands," says Matt Calkins, president of Vienna, Va.-based Appian Corp., a portal vendor working on Army Knowledge Online.

In fact, many federal, state and local agencies are building next-generation portals, but few of them have actually reached the pinnacle-an always-on portal that provides all its users need and want. Although the technology exists to make this goal a reality, only a few are successfully dealing with the myriad challenges inherent in such a huge undertaking.

The architects of the Navy Marine Corp Portal could have achieved many of their goals by simply linking the portal to the Navy's vast array of smaller portals, but Howell's team intends to reach a loftier goal-full integration, access to real-time data, collaboration, and the ability to verify users' identities at any location.

One of the first challenges Howell's team has had to address is choosing among thousands of software applications in use across the Navy-many with redundant functions and data. The choice has political ramifications, but stepping on toes isn't Howell's biggest concern. Instead, his biggest challenge is to wade through the applications to determine which use the best data, which use stale data, and which deserve to remain active.

"[The Navy Marine Corps Intranet] has shown us that the approximately 100,000 applications we have out there is a serious problem, but at the same time, it's a great opportunity to make real improvements in the way we field information systems," Howell says. (NMCP is the new term for the NMCI.)

The portal team, in concert with the Navy chief information officer, established functional area managers to evaluate applications for specific fields such as logistics, finance, and human resources. This method has greatly simplified the process of choosing applications for the portal, Howell says.

Another major hurdle is the limited bandwidth aboard the Navy's 300 ships. Because of these limitations, some portal locations are disconnected from the network, sometimes for days. Once they reconnect, data and applications must immediately be synchronized and replicated so shipboard personnel have access to the latest information. For now, portal users must manually download updated files at each location, but Howell says these functions eventually will be automatic.

Security, especially when dealing with mission-critical information and lives, is crucial to NMCP. One necessary function is the ability to positively identify and authenticate all users. The system will include both authentication and a single sign-on, which provides every user with a unique access identification.

Another security issue is the limited space on Navy vessels. "Space for hardware is limited, yet we have to have support for multiple networks with different classifications. That means we may have to host one application two or three times, depending on the security classification, and that takes up a lot of room," Howell says.

REGULATIONS R US

Developing a global portal does not require reinventing the wheel. Regulations.gov, is a governmentwide portal for pending rules and regulations. It's currently under development. Building on past success, the project is off to a running start. The portal is being developed under the auspices of the Environmental Protection Agency because of its success with its EPA Dockets (EDOCKET) system. Representatives from 12 agencies and a consultant looked at government portals and deemed EDOCKET, an online public docket and comment system for EPA regulations, to be the closest in functionality and professionalism to the one they wanted to create.

The text- and image-based Regulations.gov will mark the first time federal regulations from all 180 agencies will be in one place, accessible and available for comment by the general public. When complete, the portal will allow citizens and business owners to search on any word and provide them access to open rules and documents, accompanying data such as cost-benefit and paperwork reduction analyses and risk assessment. It will enable them to comment on anything they find.

"If a motorcycle owner wanted to search for all rules and documents with the word 'motorcycle' in them, the search would turn up everything from all agencies that's open today. It even includes comments sent by mail that have been scanned into the system," says Oscar Morales, e-rulemaking project director for Regulations.gov and IT director for the EPA.

Although Morales and his team are patterning the architecture of Regulations.gov on the EDOCKET system, they are encountering issues that the much smaller EPA system didn't have to address. One is the massive amount of rules from numerous agencies, all with different processes and procedures. "By and large, we're on our own," he says. "We're trying to use as many best practices as we can by attending a monthly meeting at [the Office of Management and Budget] with other program managers from other e-gov initiatives, but there is no exact parallel to draw from."

But the most daunting challenge the Regulations.gov team faces is a cultural one. Only two federal statutes apply to the way agencies issue rules, which means many agencies operate differently. For example, some allow anonymous comments, while others require a name, address and other information. Some agencies publish all comments they receive, while others only publish some, based on their relevance.

"A lot of these business practices have to be standardized from an IT perspective before we can have any sort of national system," Morales says. He has created seven interagency groups to resolve this issue. One group consists of attorneys, another includes technical experts, and another includes budget specialists.

The sheer number of agencies Regulations.gov must deal with creates its own problems. While about 30 agencies have some type of automated rule-making systems, many of those systems are outdated and built with proprietary technology. The vast majority of agencies have no automated system at all-it's all on paper.

Decisions about migrating some legacy systems to the new Regulations.gov portal while decommissioning others create difficulties as well. Not surprisingly, those problems are more political than technical. "Here at EPA, we combined seven systems into one when we launched EDOCKET and saved money, and ultimately OMB wants to show on its books that it has saved money by doing the same thing," Morales says. "But it's a big deal. It's like Procter & Gamble telling Kraft it will save them money by taking over their e-mail system and combining it with their own."

To attack this thorny issue, Morales and his team have encouraged as much collaboration and participation by all agencies as possible, again with the help of the seven interagency groups. Each group is headed by someone from a different agency, and consists of 15 to 40 members. The Regulations.gov team briefs two to three agencies each week on its progress.

Morales expects the team to issue a request for proposals this fall, based on a blueprint and architecture it is developing with Documentum Inc. and Oracle Corp. The vendors developed the technology for EPA's EDOCKET system as well. Within two years, Morales expects the agencies that generate 80 percent to 90 percent of the rules to be on the system, with the remaining agencies up and running within four years.

ROOM TO GROW

Both Regulations.gov and NMCP are examples of maturing, feature-rich portals, and there are others in the planning stages. The first step toward building effective portals is determining what type of information should be included-something government is getting much better at doing, says Tim Hoechst, senior vice president of technology for Oracle Government, Education and Healthcare. "Those who have gotten better at choosing what's relevant are those who have identified and recognized what people want from their portal," he says. "When people go into a room with a whiteboard and try to decide what should be on a portal, they have less success than when people put up a portal and get feedback, evolving the content over time to meet what people want."