Electronic Commerce at the

U.S. Department of the Interior

Charles Nethaway

Electronic Commerce for the 21st Century

wasc.usgs.gov/ec21

National Business Center*Mission Statement

We provide our customers with innovative solutions through quality administrative systems, operations, and professional

support services.

*The National Business Center (NBC) is a self-contained business unit of the Department of the Interior,

acting as a “small business,” providing services to Government Agencies.

Selected Customers

U.S. Department of the Interior U.S. House of Representatives Drug Enforcement Agency U.S. Department of Commerce General Services Administration

Electronic Commerce

Procurement: Web “Requests for Quotes” Vendor Quotes via Web Vendor Inquiries via Web (INQUIRE21) Vendor Bill Submittal via Web (INVOICE21) Electronic Funds Transfers (EFT) Analysis on Web (ANALYSIS-21)

Sample EC Impact

Cost, Each Manual Transaction $80 $130

Cost, Each EC Transaction $10 $50

Cost Avoidance, Min. $30

Cost Avoidance, Max. $120

100,000 Trans. Impact $3M $12M

EC21 Environment

HW - Sun 4500, NT and UNIX desktops SW - Solaris, Netscape Web Server, Netscape

and MSIE 4.0x browsers, java, Oracle (ODBC/JDBC), digital certificates

Browser: java, frames, digital certificates, 128-bit encryption

EC Format: X12 EDI & Web (interactive)

EC21 Challenges

Performance: applet screen painting, database retrievals (ODBC and DB optimizations)

Scalability: serving from “few” to a million hits per day; growth strategies

Tool kits: java visual tools; web design speed; quality assurance; version control; geographically distributed staff

We Need Developers (!)

Have Government and Contractor Staff Need University Students (and Faculty) Flexible Hiring Practices, including Student and

Faculty appointments, and co-op appointments Short-term Module Development

Solve Performance Issues Crack “Nitty-Gritty” Production

Issues

Department of the InteriorElectronic Commerce

Contact

Charles Nethaway

cnethawa@usgs.gov

703-648-7077wasc.usgs.gov/ec21

Screen-ScrapesDemonstration Slides

The following Power-Point slides are “screen scrapes” from actual

Web pages from the EC21 applications.