When the National Institutes of Health Office of Human Resources realized they had the opportunity to assume ownership of their part of an enterprise portal that PPC had been working on for NIH, they jumped at it. OHR knew that a portal would be of particular value to a department that handled benefits and employment issues for all 20,000 NIH employees.

The OHR was particularly interested in using the NIH portal as a platform to launch their new enterprise-wide electronic HR applicants (eHR). For example, PPC is working with the OHR to implement BizFlow® (by Handysoft), a business process management tool, for which the portal will be the delivery mechanism.

OHR was able to leverage much of the work already done: the portal community that PPC had designed for them, the portlets for that community, and the thousands of documents that had already been identified as relevant to HR.

This virtual community serves as an online resource center, a collaboration space, and a one-stop shop for HR services for all NIH employees. From the HR community or their own webpage, users can access a forms library, HR policies and procedures, a payroll calendar, an HR events calendar, and NIH directories searchable in a variety of ways. They can use Benefits Quick Links to review or update their insurance and retirement options and policies, click to the federal government's EmployeeExpress website to review or change payroll information, or use CareerHere/HHS Careers to tap into information about other jobs available at NIH and create an online resume.

The portal has already saved OHR staff many hours of time answering questions, allowed NIH employees to have quicker and easier control of their benefits, and streamlined much of the hiring process. And it will continue to provide a flexible delivery platform for whatever applications they add and communications they want to publish. In addition, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) was so impressed with the HR Community and HR document directory structure, that they are using the HR information on the NIH portal as a model for their own portal.

TOOLS
Plumtree 4.5 Corporate Portal
Microsoft Active Server Pages
Microsoft Internet Information Services
Microsoft SQL Server 2000
Microsoft Visual Studio .Net
Microsoft Windows 2000 server


CONTACT INFORMATION
Dale Tuttle
Project Performance Corporation
703-748-7065
dtuttle@ppc.com