Water Resources Division ITAC Home Page

Data Chief Constituents Report, June 20, 2003

Dear Data Chiefs,

Please find attached a link to the minutes of the latest ITAC meeting that occurred on June 10-12 in the Pennsylvania District Office in New Cumberland, PA. The link is at:

http://water.usgs.gov/usgs/itac/minutes/030610PA_agenda.html

Some notable items that relate to our type of work (details are located in the minutes):

• Districts, and especially data section personnel, should look at consolidating both a desktop computer and a field laptop into a single docking station unit. This is to keep the number of units that get counted in the enterprise software agreements "true up" process as low as possible which will, in turn, reduce the amount each district has to pay for the licenses to such software packages as MS Office. If the district does not want to go to docking stations, then they need to make sure that these types of software packages are not on field computers unless deemed necessary. The additional cost for the duplicate packages would be passed on to the district.

• The ITAC technical office rep and the ITAC NAWQA rep were merged into one representative since NAWQA and OQW were merged at the HQ level. Sandy Williamson will now represent the Tech Offices and NAWQA on ITAC for the next three years.

• The IT hardware contract for both desktops and laptops was awarded to Dell. Please contact your SA about ordering.

• OSW is providing money for the SLEDS software to be modified for the USGS sediment labs.

• Ernest Dreyer is leading a committee to study the need and potential location of a NESDIS backup location.

ITAC made several recommendations following discussions of various issues. They are listed below:

1. ITAC recognizes that in the advent of DIS reorganization, reliance on the Regional Computer Specialists (RCSers) by WRD will increase. RCSers will continue to be critical resources for the support of NWIS, as well as other Office of Information initiatives. Also, RCSers will become the focal points of WRD science center IT issues.

2. ITAC supports the migration of certain fuctions of the WRD DIS office to the Bureau's Chief Technology Officer (CTO) supervision that have a scope larger than WRD as outlined in the "Final Report of the Scientific Services Committee", with the documented concern of the potential drop of the level of service to WRD. ITAC strongly insists WRD-focused functions, such as NWIS support, SunTAC, field computing efforts, and WRD water web projects remain under WRD supervision.

3. ITAC believes that the NESDIS GOES DCS, and the current DCS backup study, is critical to the WRD mission. ITAC recommends that OSW put high priority in completing the draft letter requesting that the GOES DCS be authorized as a National Critical Infrastructure (NCI) system, and that this draft letter be presented through Bob Hirsch for signature by Director Chip Groat.

4. ITAC supports the Sametime comparison to Raindance (Web conferencing software packages) with a test of a large attendee group with the goal of making suggestions to WRD and/or the USGS.

5. ITAC's role of providing a feedback mechanism between the Districts and the WRD Senior Staff/Office of Information and the Bureau's Chief Technology Officer becomes even more critical with the proposed migration of several DIS functions to the CTO office, and therefore, recommends that a member of the new CTO office, preferably the current DIS office chief, maintain a permanent membership on ITAC.

Please let me know if you have any feedback to pass on, or any questions with regards to the topics that ITAC covered.

Thanks,
Brian

Brian E. McCallum, Assistant District Chief, Georgia District
U.S. Geological Survey 3039 Amwiler Road, Suite 130
Atlanta, GA 30360
P: 770.903.9127
F: 770.903.9199