Fire and Ice, Notes - Mail and More

A Case Study of Accelerated Lotus Notes DeploymentMickie MarjerisonUSDA Forest Service

About the Forest Service

About the Forest Service

•Stewards for over 193 million acres of public land

•32,000 employees – 800 locations

•Most offices with < 40 people

•Largest agency in the USDA

•Fire Season – March-October

Why Notes?

• Industry Standard

•Supports our mobile workforce

•Knowledge base

•Document management

•Applications

•Workflow/collaboration

Initial Objectives

• Implement Email!• Reduce email volume by 60% over next

48 months• Get operational info out of inboxes• Better communications with public,

external groups, and with ourselves• 95% of employees can do 95% of their

work from the desktop• Look for opportunities of vertical

integration• Reach outside the IRM community

Deployment Approaches

•Mail was first

• Exploit Notes features

• Be careful what we promise

• Peaceably integrate not proselytize

• Involve the field

• Use Notes to deploy Notes

• Concentrate on the important, not the interesting

Employee Involvement

•Architecture/Administration – Design, operation and support

•Strategy– Direction, communication and

energy

•Database Facilitation– Innovation, coordination and

production

Time & Attendance Reporting

•Phased implementation•User-friendly desktop•Compatible with National

Finance Center mainframes•Absolute reliability•Different pay plans and

work schedules

Time and Attendance Application

Centralized Help Desk

•Change in the way we do business

•Dynamic and static resource

•Cultural barriers

•Partnering with our contractor

•Expanding this year

Helpdesk Application

Desktop Guides

Upward Reporting

•Input from all levels

•Reporting at all levels

•Computer naive audience

•Paper based, labor intensive, comfortable current methods

Senior, Youth, and Volunteer Programs Upward Reporting

Correspondence Database

•Drafts created and routed locally

•Finals stored nationally

•Access simplified for FOIA requests

•Some speed problems

•Employee education

Correspondence

What we would have done differently

•Standardize on a Move/Add/Change process earlier

•Deal with Name conflicts differently

•Move some business processes up further in the timeline– E.G. Correspondence database

Since Mail…

•Exploiting groupware, workflow, collaboration features

•Resource scheduling

•Connecting to other Government Domains

Where to Next?

• Integrating GIS with Notes

•Sametime

•Equipping the mobile workforce

•Working with external customers

•Publishing to the Web

•Standard Agency portal

Integrating GIS & Notes

Forest Planning•Large part of FS workload

– Long-term, large inter-disciplinary process

– Requirement to maintain public record

•Process governed by NEPA– Requires public input– Analysis of, and response to, public

comments

Integrating GIS & Notes

Forest Planning

•Forest Planning is an iterative collaboration process involving lots of participants both internal and external to the agency.

• Integrating planning documents and geospatial information offers tremendous improvements to the delivery of content.

Integrating GIS & Notes

Final Impressions

• Job not easy, but worth the effort• It’s changing the way we do

business•Keeping a handle on all the

databases isn’t easy• It will play a key role in our e-gov

initiatives•We have come a long way in a

year and a half