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NBC Profile |
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NBC PROFILE - SUMMER 2005
Financial and Business Management System Implementation |
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The Financial and Business Management System (FBMS) is a standard, Department of the Interior (DOI)-wide system that will provide an integrated management application suite to address the full range of business, financial, and administrative functions that are currently performed through a variety of applications and process. The FBMS is based upon the SAP Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP) tool, coupled with best-of-breed vendor solutions for supplemental capabilities not offered through SAP. The FBMS will provide the DOI with greatly expanded management and data accessibility capabilities over that available today, and its implementation will also establish more consistent business practices throughout the DOI.
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Fred Schneider, UNIX Technical Lead who works for the Denver office of NBC, stands next to some of the servers that have been installed to support FBMS production activities.
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In November 2004, the NBC was selected to provide hosting and applications management support to the FBMS. Since that time, the Solutions Coordination Office and the IT Directorate (ITD) have been working very hard to support the DOI in the implementation and production processing of the FBMS.
The first deployment-called Deployment 1-occurred in March 2005, delivering FBMS Grants management capabilities to the Minerals Management Service, the Office of Surface Mining, and the Fish and Wildlife Service. This deployment provided for an automated capability to track and manage Federal grants to a level that had not previously existed in the DOI. Following this deployment, three additional deployments-2 through 4-are tentatively scheduled for October 2006, 2007, and 2008. These deployments will implement the full FBMS capabilities to all DOI offices and bureaus. The NBC has been working closely with Bearing Point, the FBMS Integration Contractor, to meet these dates.
Hosting Support
SAP is the premier ERP product in the world today, and the extensive capabilities that it delivers come with a significant level of sophistication and complexity. At full deployment, the FBMS environment will contain 137 servers and approximately 30 terabytes of storage capacity. The environment will also contain multiple security zones, load balancing across application servers, multiple database management systems, and a variety of automated monitoring and management capabilities. Adding to this complexity is the geographic separation of components of the overall environment. The FBMS Production and Training environments will be hosted in the NBC's Denver Data Center; and the FBMS Development, Deployment, and Quality Assurance environments will be hosted in the DOI's Enterprise Services Center in Herndon, VA.
Establishing the support infrastructure, therefore, required establishing processing support capabilities in both locations within a very short time frame. Servers, storage area networks, communications equipment, and software tools all had to be ordered, installed, configured, hardened, and tested. In addition, a number of integrated activities had to be accomplished with Bearing Point to support their application installation and configuration activities.
By mid-January, the FBMS production support environments for Deployment 1 had been established, including installation and configuration of application and database servers, disk and tape storage systems, and network connectivity devices. In addition, automated systems monitoring and management systems were installed and configured to provide real-time, proactive health and well-being management within the environment. After establishing the environment, the NBC ITD actively supported the BearingPoint development team and the FBMS Project Management Office in the installation, configuration, and testing of the application. Following the March deployment, the ITD began providing production hosting support for the FBMS and, at the same time, establishing the development and testing environments for Deployment 2. These environments have now also been established, along with the Deployment 2 Production environment. There is still a great deal of work to do, but a great deal has been accomplished to date. The development and testing environments for all future releases have been built, and most of the technical complexities of the production support environments will be implemented with Deployment 2. The deployments in October 2007 and October 2008 will require additional processing and storage capacity, but will require very few other changes to the support environment.
Applications Management
Supporting the SAP product line is a new requirement for the NBC, requiring a set of knowledges and specialized skills that the NBC does not currently have. In order to develop those skills while meeting the FBMS deployment time frames, the NBC has entered into a contract with BearingPoint for SAP application management support. BearingPoint is a large provider of these services for other customers and has the required skills readily available. The NBC engagement with BearingPoint is for 40+ months and provides not only for SAP application support over that period, but also for a knowledge transfer of those skills to NBC employees. The ultimate goal of the contract is to have a fully functional, internal SAP support staff by the end of full FBMS deployment.
The Application Management Team (AMT) and its BearingPoint partners have developed FBMS Help Desk support procedures and change management procedures to support Deployment 1. In March, the AMT completed eGrants applications training from the vendor, and participated in FBMS functional and technical knowledge transfer sessions from the FBMS deployment support contractor. The transfer was needed to gain further knowledge in the use and operation of the FBMS and a "user perspective" on the type of support calls that might be received.
The AMT is currently providing Help Desk and functional and technical support for the eGrants production environment. The team is also currently providing change management support for the FBMS production environment.
In preparation for Deployment 2, the AMT and its BearingPoint partners continue to modify existing Help Desk support and change management procedures. This team is also doing the planning and training required to provide support for the full FBMS product suite.
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