Integrated Management System
National Assessment of Educational Progress
Background
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as "the Nation's Report Card," is a program within the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) at the U.S. Department of Education. Since 1969, NAEP has produced the nation's only representative and continuing assessment of what America's students know and can do in subject areas such as reading, mathematics, science, writing, U.S. history, civics, geography, and the arts.
NAEP program activities are performed by NCES and half a dozen contractors, who specialize in fields such as assessment, item development, population sampling, test design and administration, and data analysis. The farflung contractors and NCES must work together closely to develop, disseminate, and report on the NAEP tests.
With so many parties sharing responsibility for performance, collaboration costs have long been an issue for the program. Now, rising national interest in educational performance has required more frequent assessments with shorter reporting deadlines.
The Challenge
NAEP had to become much more efficient in order to produce more information in less time without sacrificing its commitment to producing the highest quality data. Collaboration was identified as a key area where gains could be made. If contractors could work collaboratively on documents, stay apprised of the status of work products, and share and find information more easily, reports could be generated quicker with less errors. A key challenge to the success of the collaboration effort was that the various contractors are independent companies with discrete, internal, firewall-protected networks. The integrity and security of each company's network could not be compromised.
The Solution
Fulcrum IT developed and implemented an integrated management system (IMS) based on Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server. SharePoint provides a platform for building Web-based document management systems that include workflow, versioning, advanced search, e-mail notifications, personalization, discussion groups, and other collaborative features. A SharePoint portal provides a central point of access to key business information and applications, shared across file servers, databases, public folders, and Internet sites.
Fulcrum IT heavily customized the IMS to meet NAEP's particular needs. Fulcrum IT integrated Exchange Server features to allow NAEP participants to share contacts and calendar items and to build a public log of important e-mail messages. Fulcrum IT leads an IMS Team that developed and reviews metadata schema for document storage and other issues. Fulcrum IT also developed an online training course and conducted classroom training to promote acceptance.
The Result
Department of Education staff and NAEP contractors can now collaborate on reports and other deliverables without the typical problems that go with sharing authorship. Document management features such as check-in-check-out, version control, and version history prevent the problems of duplicative document drafts or revisions getting lost or overwritten. Online discussions (also known as "forums" or "bulletin boards") can be associated with documents to facilitate communication during the draft and review process.
The IMS integrates Windows 2000 security features, such as network authentication, data privacy, digital signatures, and encryption to ensure a secure work environment for all users. Access to content is controlled through the use of role-based security. This means that a user's role will dictate the type of actions he can perform on content.
As a result of these security features, the IMS makes it possible for contractors to share and hand off tasks in a secure, managed environment. With a shared workspace that securely spans across the Internet, inter-organizational teams can share documents as easily as if they were on a local area network. Teams can work together on drafts within private directories, and then publish the results to the portal, all without compromising organizational privacy.
Publishing a document makes it available to all users. The collection of published documents is available to users through logical subject categories. Advanced search capabilities help IMS users find information that would otherwise be scattered among the various contractor organizations. Users can subscribe to documents, categories, or even search results and thereby receive e-mails when the subscribed documents are updated by someone.
Fulcrum IT has also provided online conferencing across NAEP by incorporating NetMeeting functionality into the IMS. This allows IMS users to easily schedule and participate in web conferences—much as one would with WebEx or PlaceWare, except without the high subscription cost. It has even been extended to reach NAEP consultants who do not use the IMS.
The IMS is a familiar, intuitive web-based environment that presents minimal training requirements for users. It integrates well with the Microsoft products most people use every day. The NAEP Calendar and Contacts directory, for example, look and function much like Outlook.
"The IMS can be thought of as a knowledge management tool," said Peter Lazar, Fulcrum IT's NAEP Program Director. For example, information that would ordinarily live only in individual e-mail folders can be posted to folders shared across organizational boundaries. "However, the IMS is more than a portal or information repository. It's more like an environment in which work takes place," Lazar said.