ITAC Activities

The Water Discipline.s Information Technology Advisory Committee (ITAC) is forwarding the attached recommendations about Lotus to the CTO.

The Water Discipline.s Information Technology Advisory Committee (ITAC) recognizes Lotus as a mission-critical enterprise system because it affects the productivity of every employee. However, after four years of usage, system performance is still quite variable. It is ITAC's observation that Lotus continues to be maintained and supported by volunteers whose time is also committed to preexisting full-time jobs, and there is no formal user group or Customer Advisory Board looking at prioritizing customer requirements. Therefore, ITAC recommends the following:

• Formalize a Lotus support group staff at the national bureau level using Lotus regional support funds.
• Create a Customer Advisory Board, as industry best practices would dictate, to assist the Lotus team in prioritizing tasks, developing bureau e-mail policy, and providing feedback from the USGS user community at large.
• Examine the current structure where GS Help Lotus Help Desk staff and USGS Lotus operations are under different management and determine if it would improve communication and sharing of personnel resources to have both units under common management.

Examples of current problems to be addressed:

• Slow response to user.s requests for support -- Because of the lack of support staff, many users are forced to find their own work-arounds, an inefficient solution.
• Disk space limit - The "one-size-fits-all" quota limit does not discriminate power users and senior leaders requiring large volumes of email traffic. Further analysis of alternatives, such as a quota scale (recognizing light and heavy users) should be performed.

• Space limit enforcement mechanism - The current penalty for exceeding quota thresholds (no receiving or sending of email) should be re-evaluated. Undelivered mail is viewed as a penalty to the sender not to the recipient who has exceeded the threshold. It is recommended that an "unable to send mail" penalty would be a sufficient deterrent to exceeding mail quota thresholds.

In Summary:

With a full-time support staff, it is anticipated that user satisfaction and system performance monitoring could be improved, and that functionality could be provided that goes beyond e-mail, to include: such capabilities as group ware (Quickplace, Sametime); SPAM blocking; attachment management;, wireless e-mail and/or archiving software.

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Katherine Lins
Acting Chief, Office of Information, WRD
U.S. Geological Survey
440 National Center, Reston, VA 20192
703-648-5014
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