A View from the BridgeThe Markle Foundation’s Task Force on National Security in the Information Age recently released a report1 identifying key actions the US Government can take to combat terrorism. Their high level recommendations:
In addition, the executive summary included this statement: “Today we are still vulnerable to attack because –as on 9/11 – we are still not able to connect the dots…” To learn more about how eB ensures trustworthy information, read the Informatics of eB White Paper. 1“ Nation At Risk: Policy Makers Need Better Information to Protect the Country”, March 2009, www.markle.org Feature Story Did you know that eB is used by the NuStart Energy Consortium to manage the NRC application process for the next generation of U.S. Nuclear power plants?NuStart Energy is a limited liability corporation comprised of ten power companies, created in 2004 for the dual purposes of: 1) submitting a combined Construction and Operating License Application (COLA) to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), and 2) completing the design engineering for selected reactor technologies based on either a GE or Westinghouse design. NuStart has modeled the licensing process in eB and takes advantage of eB’s powerful information management capabilities, which are based on the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) AP-907 specification for controlled documents and records management. The solution infrastructure is provided via the Web by SAIC and available 7x24x365 to consortium members for collaboration and information management of all assets required for the COLA submission to the NRC. eB provides a secure, trusted information management platform for consortium members to submit, review, comment and approve design documents and NRC application submission material, including standardized licensing, engineering, technical, quality, and safety information. eB’s permission features ensure that consortium members only have access to information that is relevant to their design, construction and licensing plans. For example, members only have access to information that is based on their specific reactor design, either GE or Westinghouse. Once submitted, eB is used to manage the defense of the license submittal and to monitor status. eB also provides Action / Commitment tracking of responses to Requests for Additional Information (RAI's) ensuring timely closeout of issues or questions raised throughout the process. The ten member power companies include: DTE Energy, Duke Energy, EDF International, Entergy, Exelon, Florida Power & Light, Progress Energy, SCANA Corporation, Southern Company and Tennessee Valley Authority. To learn more about NuStart Energy visit www.nustartenergy.com. Industry Perspective Solving the Brain Drain of the Nuclear Industry–a White Paper PreviewBy Hilmar Retief, product manager, Enterprise Informatics and Leslie Robins, marketing communications manager, Enterprise InformaticsAs the Nuclear renaissance is taking shape, more and more organizations realize that the knowledge and skills being lost due to baby boomer retirements are threatening the bottom line by compromising the safety and efficiency of plant operations. In the heyday of global nuclear development, nuclear plants drew the best of the best from universities and an abundant engineering and nuclear knowledge worker pool. But the United States has not had a new nuclear power plant since the mid-1980s. This latency in the evolution of nuclear power has affected the industry by reducing the number of nuclear university programs and discouraging new engineers from pursuing disciplines in the nuclear field. During this period a global freeze on new nuclear plant development magnified the problem. The amount of new talent entering the industry became stagnant for decades. With the new emphasis on green energy, smaller carbon footprints and the ecological impact and cost of fossil fuels, the nuclear industry is once again growing, producing a rising market demand for nuclear professionals and an increased awareness of the need to maintain, sustain and grow the nuclear knowledgebase. The growth of the industry will be impeded unless viable solutions are implemented to capture and apply the knowledge of workers. In 2006, the IAEA’s (International Atomic Energy Agency) report titled Risk Management of Knowledge Loss in Nuclear Industry Organizations, stated “There are two other complicating factors. The USA faces the issue of a ‘greying’ workforce where literally half the current workers will be eligible to retire within the next five years. Secondly, the lead time required to produce an individual capable of safely operating the complex nuclear systems and technologies may exceed the timeframe available until substantial retirement of the existing workforce begins.” According to the IAEA it is critical to establish knowledge management programs to “maximize the flow of nuclear knowledge from one generation to the next and attract, maintain and further develop a dedicated cadre of highly competent professional staff to sustain nuclear competence.1 ” Throughout the career of a nuclear professional knowledge is accumulated not only through direct experience but also from the intangible experience gained from being a part of a complex operational environment. This cumulative knowledge is impossible to quantify. However, the potential impact of this lost knowledge can increase costs through:
1IAEA Nuclear Energy Series No. NG-T-6.2, Development of Knowledge Portals for Nuclear Power Plants Preregister now to receive this white paper as soon as it is available. For additional information on Nuclear Knowledge Management, visit our website. Hilmar Retief Hilmar has more than 17 years experience in the field of software engineering and more than 9 years in the disciplines of configuration management, asset and document management. Since 2000, Hilmar has worked exclusively in the nuclear industry and specifically in the areas of Document Management, Configuration Management and Enterprise Information Management. Hilmar joined Enterprise Informatics in January 2006 and as Product Manager he is involved in the full product life cycle and continues to stay abreast of all aspects of the Nuclear and industrial business processes, problems that plague the industry as a result of information management challenges and continued efforts to improve performance and safety. Leslie Robins Leslie has over 23 years of experience in marketing and advertising for a wide variety of customers, including high-tech software and hardware firms. In her role as marketing communications manager for Enterprise Informatics, Leslie is responsible for global marketing programs including advertising, online marketing, collateral development and public relations. Partner Perspective Covering all the Bases in ComplianceBy Tim Bovy, Chief Executive, d2 (Digital Document UK Ltd.)A recent customer (a high profile, publicly funded organization) wished to speak with d2 about their requirements for what they perceived as four different systems: information management, records management, an Information Security Management System (ISMS) as defined by ISO 27001, and a Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) solution. Our immediate response was that this was really one system, namely an Enterprise Information Management (EIM) system, covering different facets of their business. This customer is not alone in thinking that they needed several separate systems to ensure that they had covered all the bases of compliance. In fact, they are typical. Many companies, for instance, would fail to see that PCI DSS is really a subset of ISO 27001, and that if you wish to build a bullet-proof PCI DSS environment the first step is to build a bullet-proof ISMS environment. Once you realize that these requirements are simply different views of a system of comprehensive internal controls, you can take an even higher level and much broader perspective, incorporating COSO, CobiT, and ITIL into your internal control framework. This will put you at the very place where you should have started. You will have scaled the heights of a global compliance strategy that places your EIM system at the top of the pyramid, with records management, information life cycle management, compliance obligation management, risk management, ISMS, etc., all cascading down from it, linked together via a sophisticated set of business processes and business rules, and complemented by metrics and maturity models. However, your work is not yet done. You will still need a process matrix which incorporates all of your compliance methodologies. This will ensure that your system does not get derailed and that it remains part of a continuous improvement program that is constantly being monitored.
To be optimally effective, this process matrix should be integrated with your comprehensive internal control framework, and then modeled within your EIM system. When we mentioned this to the customer noted above, the immediate reaction was that this was impossible! The people in charge of the project had worked in some of the world’s largest corporations over many years, and had never seen either a document management system or an EIM system that could achieve what we were proposing. Their view was that only a very expensive system, significantly enhanced through thousands of man hours of development time, could even come close. This was when we introduced them to eB from Enterprise Informatics. Neither of the two project leaders had ever heard of eB, even though they had been trolling the internet for years searching for such a program. eB's uniqueness derives from the fact that it comes out of the engineering marketplace and is heavily used within the energy industry, whose requirements are peculiarly suited to delivering the world-class features and functionality that today's stringent regulatory environment demands across a broad spectrum of organizations. eB does much of this out of the box, although it also includes an SDK, thus providing it with maximum flexibility. What this means, and what our customer enthusiastically came to understand, is that with eB you can start at the top of your pyramid with a robust EIM system that enables you to model your process matrix/internal control framework integration, providing your Board and Management with a single system that incorporates multiple views for making risk visible across the enterprise and for making the management of compliance risk, in its many regulatory guises, fully operational and demonstrable to outside agencies. Tim Bovy Tim has nearly 30 years of experience in designing and implementing various types of information and risk management systems for organizations including BankAmerica Corporation, Deloiite & Touche, BT Health, the Kuwaiti government and the US House of Representatives. He has developed a number of proprietary methodologies for managing compliance risk related to manufacturing, finance, and government, including the requirements mandated by Sarbanes-Oxley, the Combined Code of Corporate Governance, the U.S. Federal Sentencing Guidelines, and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). For an overview of his businesses, please visit: www.d2uk.com and www.d2ops.com. Product Profile The SharePoint platform enhances eB with valuable collaboration capabilitiesBy Rick BerzlePresident, GoToMarket Corporate Marketing, Enterprise Informatics Many organizations use Microsoft Office® SharePoint® as their document management and team collaboration solution to more efficiently and effectively work together and communicate. SharePoint provides central storage and collaboration tools for managing, organizing, and sharing documents, information, and ideas. A SharePoint site helps workers:
SharePoint's strength lies in features that make it easy to capture and collect information, providing users with a workspace that enhances collaboration, creativity, spontaneity, and intuitive problem solving. It is also a compelling platform upon which built a powerful enterprise information management solution. The platform fulfills a rich set of functional requirements, reduces development cost and risk. eB's strength is its ability to manage the information life cycle to ensure information assets are governed, secure, controlled and can be trusted – delivering relevant, trustworthy information in context to business users when they need it. SharePoint and eB form a seamless solution for collecting, identifying, classifying, managing and reporting on information assets–where eB information assets are visible to a SharePoint user and SharePoint documents are controlled and managed by eB. SharePoint provides the ideal platform for easy/ubiquitous collection of information because it is accessible directly from the Microsoft Office suite of applications. eB's auto-identification features tap into this information as it is created in SharePoint; uniquely identifying it, classifying it, and relating it to what it is about, and who can and cannot access this information. eB uniquely establishes relationships between information objects and structured elements such as physical assets, polices, requirements and people that the information is related to. Many of these information objects are associated with content in SharePoint documents. eB allows information to be “packaged” together for the purpose of publishing or changing it as a set. Change typically does not impact a single document. Determining all items affected by a change event is the cornerstone to ensuring the integrity of the information that it is related to. Managing the change and publishing the updated, trustworthy information for consumption by the user through a SharePoint interface improves access and eliminates activities based on bad or poor information. Finally, eB leverages SharePoint for its powerful search/reporting capabilities to provide management dashboards and detailed reports that support compliance status, project analytics and more. Dashboard and reports can quickly and easily be developed using Reporting Services and SharePoint Report and Portal features. eB and SharePoint work together to deliver a powerful Enterprise Information Management platform that exploits the ease-of-use of SharePoint and the rich features of eB. Rick Berzle With over 25 years of experience in the high technology industry, Rick has defined and launched software product-lines resulting in business units with revenues in excess of 100 million dollars. He has successfully built functional marketing organizations from the ground up with disciplines covering marketing communications, product management, alliances/ partnerships, product marketing, market intelligence, and channel and market development. Rick is president of GoToMarket and directs strategic corporate marketing for Enterprise Informatics. Industry Events Visit the Enterprise Informatics booth at upcoming events
June 8 - 12, 2009, Nashville, TN |
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