The Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Environmental Management and Triton recently won awards at the DOE Information Management Conference for “significant contributions to the vision and future role of information technology within the Office of Environmental Management and continued leadership in striving for excellence.”
As the internal EM Communications Portal user base expanded by 800%, based on Triton’s successful implementation of single-sign on and other automated workflow deployments, Triton consultants identified the need to create a more customized and user friendly experience. Utilizing Adobe Flex in the standard Oracle WebCenter Portal provides users with a more customized, web-like experience within their communities of practice – rather than the out-of-the-box “My Documents” look and feel. These communities are consequently more appealing and easier to navigate and have consolidated documents, applications, reports, and dashboard reporting into one personalized area.
By having one collaborative area, personalized based on the users’ roles and access rights, less time is needed to find documents and/or do work. At the same time, senior management is provided one location that contains their secured information and customized dashboard reporting gives management the power of data at their fingertips.
The first example of this Adobe Flex integration occurred within one EM office’s community of practice. Using this new schema, the office was able to migrate all their legacy data off a shared network drive and onto the EM Communications Portal. This provided portal users with one location for their documents. In addition, this office automated manual reporting and integrated an action tracking tool into their community of practice. This example of integration provided management with a means to not only keep track of documents, but also keep track of actions that they needed to report to senior management.
After the successful launch of the new community of practice, five additional offices requested the redesigned schema. Additionally, the process of handling monthly project reviews was incorporated into this structure, leading to the creation of individual communities for each EM Field Site. To successfully display the same document in multiple communities of practice, meta-data tagging was also introduced. The process of submitting project reviews to EM HQ previously consisted of roughly 15 “clicks” within the EM Portal; the redesigned process only requires 3 “clicks.” Field Site users must only navigate to their Field Site page to upload their documents. Through meta-data tagging, these uploaded files are then shown to the appropriate EM HQ users in their communities of practice.