The Department of State needed a system to communicate critical developments as well as a method and system to schedule and allocate special agent protective details.
The Project
ActioNet was tasked to develop solutions to these two mission critical needs within the DoS. The first was to provide a solution for informing senior leadership of time-critical developments of potential interest to Department principals and other law enforcement agencies. The second need was a solution for scheduling and allocating special agent protective details in support of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) meeting held annually each fall in New York City.
The Solution
In response to the first need, ActioNet developed a SharePoint application that allows users to submit, edit, save, access and publish spot reports in an unclassified environment using a SharePoint workflow. Once a spot report is published, it is viewable by all authorized users. The application also allows for restricting distribution if needed, due to the sensitivity of the particular spot report. The solution provides common access to, and interaction among, the plethora of international anti-terrorism applications systems and environments.
To support the UNGA requirement, ActioNet developed a SharePoint application that allows users to enter and edit diplomatic travel arrangements and related security detail requirements and assignments. The application is used to task other supporting agency security assets and provides a variety of filtered views to provide users the information they need to do their particular job. This solution required numerous system integrations in order to retrieve data elements resident in a number of legacy applications. ActioNet analyzed the distribution of functionality across systems, developed system interface concepts, designs and specifications, and developed the specifications and standards for information transfer between these two systems.
The Result
In August of 2010, the ActioNet project team was singled out for recognition by DoS senior management for their successful development and deployment of the spot reporting application, writing in part: “In recognition of their outstanding team effort in the development and deployment of the spot report application.”
The project goal was achieved and the application was deployed to production on August 9, 2010 and has been well received by the Director and the broader Department of State.
The team was again recognized on November 18, 2010 in a “CTO SharePoint Success Briefing,” at which the CTO highlighted the success of the team in developing a SharePoint solution that improved DoS business processes and collaboration. Field Agents and DoS correspondents now have immediate access to critical terrorism related information through this DoS collaboration portal resource.
