Working with USDA's Office of the Chief Information Officer, the eGovernment project is a strategic effort designed to help USDA provide better, more efficient government services and increased accountability to citizens, business partners, and employees primarily through the use of eGovernment technologies. As both the public and private sector depend increasingly on information technology to conduct daily business, the need for coordinating USDA’s efforts toward becoming a fully integrated, effective enterprise affects virtually every agency and program within the Department.
Phase I of the project focused on conducting a readiness assessment of USDA’s customers, partners, employees and technical environment; developing a methodology for strategic and tactical eGovernment planning at both the enterprise and the agency level; fully implementing the methodology at the enterprise level to create a Departmental eGovernment Strategic Plan; recommending an eGovernment governance and process model and conducting a policy gap analysis; and creating an eGovernment communication methodology and accompanying marketing materials. Phase II of the project built off the Departmental eGovernment Strategic Plan and consisted of guiding eGovernment tactical planning at the agency level as well as facilitating the development of 12 business cases for prospective eGovernment initiatives. The business cases were divided in to two categories: strategic initiatives that focus on program delivery and enabling business cases which focus on creating underlying deployment capabilities for the strategic initiatives and specific agency initiatives. Phase III of the project was focused on advancing the enabling business cases to the select level where funding decisions are made by the Office of Management and Budget and conducting implementation planning for the eventual development of capabilities discussed in the business cases.
The current phase, Phase IV, consists of the detailed planning and design tasks required to prepare the enabling initiatives for development in the next phase of the project. The enabling initiatives include eAuthentication, eDeployment, and eLearning. The following work streams are key components of Phase IV:
eAuthentication: Conduct the detailed planning and design tasks to prepare for development of the eAuthentication solution set.
eDeployment: Define the vendor products and an associated architecture to prepare for the development of eDeployment capabilities.
eLearning: Define the outsourcing vendor who will provide eLearning products and services and who will lead implementation activities.
usda.gov: Conduct the detailed planning and design tasks for the usda.gov portal application to prepare for development.
Web Presence: Define enterprise-wide user interface (UI) guidelines and standards that developers will leverage when creating Web-based applications and Web sites in USDA.
