E-projects march on

The Enterprise Human Resources Integration Project is one of five White House e-government initiatives the Office of Personnel Management is managing.

In late June, OPM hired two senior procurement officials to increase the office's capacity for acquiring the new online capabilities and to bolster its expertise in areas such as outsourcing.

Corey Rindner, who joins OPM from the Treasury Department, will be in charge of procurement in OPM's Management Division. Kay Thayer Ely, a former

Office of Federal Procurement Policy senior executive, joins OPM from consulting firm Acquisition Solutions Inc. She will manage the e-government procurements and advise on competitive sourcing policy.

The other four initiatives are at varying stages of development:

* The e-Training program is developing a Web portal that provides one-stop access to training and information about training for federal employees. More than 50,000 users have registered with the site, www.golearn.gov, and users have completed 24,000 courses. OPM is migrating users of the Transportation Virtual University to the consolidated site and will add more courses and capabilities at the end of July.

* E-Clearance is supposed to streamline and improve the security clearance process, which suffers from enormous backlogs. Paper applications for security clearances will be replaced with an online form that can be updated and re-submitted easily. Documents related to prior security investigations are being imaged for ready retrieval. Defense and civilian clearance records are being linked. The upshot is that much duplicative effort will be eliminated. The online form is in the final testing phase.

* Recruitment One-Stop calls for outsourcing and enhancing the USA Jobs Web site over the remainder of this fiscal year. A General Accounting Office decision in April, upholding a bid protest over the selection of the contractor to operate the upgraded site, appears to have had little effect on the project. Asked about the situation, an OPM spokesman would say only "it remains a pending legal matter." He said the project had recently reached a major milestone in its development but would not provide specifics.

* E-Payroll will consolidate 22 federal payroll systems, standardizing policies and procedures across agencies. From the 22 existing payroll providers, four agencies have been selected to provide payroll services: the Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS), the General Services Administration, the Agriculture Department's National Finance Center (NFC) and the Interior Department's National Business Center (NBC). DFAS and GSA have been asked to form one partnership, and NFC and NBC have been asked to form another. Agencies are beginning to migrate their payroll processing to one provider or the other.