OPM details e-gov progress

As the managing partner of five e-government initiatives, the Office of Personnel Management is making progress with each one, officials said this week.

OPM oversees Recruitment One-Stop, e-Clearance, e-Payroll, e-Training and the Enterprise Human Resources Integration system.

"We frame, with these initiatives, the entire civilian employment lifecycle," OPM's e-gov project director Norm Enger said at a press briefing that he used to detail the status of each program.

- On Aug. 4, OPM launched the latest version of a major piece of the recruitment initiative, the USAJobs Web site. Before the launch, the site saw about 30,000 users per day, Enger said, and on day one of the new site, there were 300,000 users. The site now receives an average of 200,000 unique users per day, he said.

The employment site, intended to simplify the process of finding and applying for federal jobs, also features 144,000 new resumes posted since Aug. 4. "What we have here is a site that is getting more and more use, and as it rolls forward, we're adding more and more features," Enger said.

- e-Clearance reached a major milestone last summer with the launch of online form SF 86 for applying for security clearances. OPM also now has a central database of information on all active civilian clearances; in January, the repository was linked to the Defense Department's database, Enger said.

- e-Payroll, an initiative to consolidate 22 payroll systems into two, is expected to save $1.1 billion over 10 years, Enger said.

- The e-Training project, Gov Online Learning Center, which provides online training courses, is beginning to not only offer classes but also provide career planning and other services, Enger said.

Gov Online project manager Mike Fitzgerald said his site will soon feature communities of practice, in which the virtual learning center will have separate areas for chief procurement executives, chief information officers, financial management officials and chief human capital officers. Each area will have tools for virtual collaboration that will likely be featured in Gov Online's fourth module to be released in September 2004, he said.

-- Enterprise Human Resources Integration, a plan to move personnel records from paper to electronic versions, was the last OPM e-gov initiative to go live, which it did on Sept. 30 with the initial deployment of the data repository. Personnel records of more than 1.8 million employees are now in a central database, which allows for human resources personnel to easily access information, write reports and determine the demographics of the workforce, officials said. Subsequent releases of the project will include more data on former employees and more functionality.