OMB to use WITS to track inventory

The Office of Management and Budget

The Office of Management and Budget is developing a database called the Workforce Inventories Tracking System (WITS), a Web-based system that should be in place this fiscal year, according to an OMB memo. The system will ease the process of filing agencies’ annual inventories of commercial and governmental activities.

Agencies will submit their inventories through WITS either directly via the Web or by a bulk uploading process using an agency’s existing system but in a format aligned with WITS, the memo states. The direct Web interface will allow agencies to compile and submit their inventories on the system itself rather than using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.

Once WITS is in place, agencies planning to use an existing system to compile their inventories will need to develop a way to export that system’s information into an Extensible Markup Language format for bulk uploads, according to the memo.

WITS is scheduled to be ready in fiscal 2006. Because of time constraints, however, agencies will submit their 2006 inventories to OMB using the OMB spreadsheet template. OMB will then load the data into WITS.