E-Rulemaking team studies three technical directions

By month’s end, a final architecture for the E-Rulemaking project will be set.Project director Oscar Morales said the E-Rulemaking team and its integration contractors, BearingPoint Inc. of McLean, Va., and Lockheed Martin Corp., late this month will give the project’s executive steering committee cost and technical analyses for three architecture options. The committee, which is made up of senior officials from across government, will choose one for the governmentwide electronic dockets system.Karen Evans, the Office of Management and Budget’s administrator for e-government and IT, recently said E-Rulemaking, one of the 25 Quicksilver initiatives, may take a new technical direction.“We will present as much detailed information to the executive committee as they can digest,” Morales said. “From the cost to build the system to maintenance to timetables and security requirements, we will let them assess the three options and then we will move forward with their decision.”Morales outlined the three options:“We have to find the solution that provides the best value to the public and the entire federal government at the lowest cost and least amount of time to get up and running,” Morales said.Preliminary data show the centralized approach may be the best fit, he said. Distributed and tiered models have potential challenges that raise the overall cost of the project, especially when it comes to security, software enhancements and data management, Morales said.