The Enterprise Software Initiative (ESI) is a Department of Defense (DoD) initiative to streamline the acquisition process and provide best-priced, standards-compliant information technology (IT). The ESI is a business discipline used to coordinate multiple IT investments and leverage the buying power of the government for commercial IT products and services. By consolidating IT requirements and negotiating Enterprise Agreements with software vendors, the DoD realizes significant Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) savings in IT acquisition and maintenance. The goal is to develop and implement a process to identify, acquire, distribute and manage IT from the enterprise level.

In September 2001, the ESI was approved as a "quick hit" initiative under the DoD Business Initiative Council (BIC). Under the BIC, the ESI will become the bench-mark acquisition strategy for the licensing of commercial software and will ex-tend a Software Asset Management Framework across the DoD. Additionally, the ESI was incorporated into the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement (DFARS) Section 208.74 on Oct. 25, 2002, and DoD Instruction 500.2 in May 2003.

Unless otherwise stated authorized ESI users include all DoD components, and their employees including Reserve component (Guard and Reserve) and the U.S. Coast Guard mobilized or attached to DoD; other government employees assigned to and working with DoD; non-appropriated funds instrumentalities such as NAFI employees; Intelligence Community (IC) covered organizations to include all DoD Intel System member organizations and employees, but not the CIA nor other IC employees unless they are assigned to and working with DoD organizations; DoD contractors authorized in accordance with the FAR; and authorized Foreign Military Sales.

We've all seen the images of Hurricane Katrina's destruction--flooded streets, destroyed homes, shattered families. It's these same images that are helping rebuild the lives of our fellow Americans in the Gulf Coast.

More than 1,600 United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) employees are supporting the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and other state, federal, and volunteer agencies in the recovery efforts throughout Mississippi and Louisiana (see Figure 1). But before the recovery efforts could begin, the region needed to be mapped out. The hurricane had blown away most of the street signs, so rescue and recovery teams had no idea what streets they were on.

USACE uses a geographic information system (GIS)--a computer-based information system and analytical tool--to create the necessary maps. According to one of the three USACE action officers who are responsible for deploying and managing GIS teams throughout the disaster region, the GIS takes data from various sources--including aerial photography, flood zones, and demographic data--and combines these layers of information in various ways as overlays to perform spatial analysis and produce a map that depicts the results of that analysis.


USACE uses GIS images in performing the following recovery efforts:

* Assessing post-disaster damage. To assess damage, maps are created of the entire region. First, aerial photos are taken of the region and then are laid over geographic coordinates. This information is brought into a computer mapping system to create a map.

* Rescuing and recovering. The GIS teams gather data on where hurricane victims are located and feed this information into the GIS database. This data is combined with the aerial photography and other geographic data to produce maps that search-and-rescue workers can use to locate and recover stranded individuals.

* Building temporary homes. Temporary housing is only allowed to be developed on land that is not prone to flooding, is safe, and is in the proximity of services such as hospitals and schools. Data on the flood zones is combined with other data types to produce maps that show the best locations for temporary housing.


* Removing debris. The GIS maps show engineers where debris is located. Engineers can calculate how much debris there is from these maps and determine how much it would cost to remove it. These maps also show where the land is clear. Clear land is needed for "staging areas" to hold the equipment that will be used to remove the debris. In addition, GIS maps show engineers the optimal routes for removing and transporting the debris.

* Pumping floodwater. The GIS can perform three-dimensional (3-D) analysis and modeling that shows how long it will take for floodwaters to subside, using different rates of pumping. In addition, GIS teams in the field can provide data about where pump stations are located and which ones are working and not working. This data was used to help calculate how long it would take to pump water out of the region.

* Identifying impacted communities. The GIS can be used to create demographic maps that identify what economic and racial groups are impacted the most. These maps are created by combining hurricane path data with the aerial images, wind speed data, and census data (see Figure 2). These maps are used by various groups involved in the rescue-and-recovery efforts, including the American Red Cross.

GIS mapping is one of several tasks that must be initiated immediately when acting on a disaster relief situation. Communicate, coordinate, and cooperate are the three essential Cs for getting things going and accomplishing what is needed in a short amount of time in disaster situations. Following are suggestions for engineers who are faced with initiating a disaster relief mission:

* Plan ahead. Have a strategy in place before a disaster occurs.

* Create a team of diversified specialists. Many of the GIS team members are non-GIS specialists who come from other disciplines. These other additional skills can combine to meet the many needs during a disaster.

* Organize and utilize available resources. USACE needed to take aerial photography of the disaster and was able to immediately call on a contractor to perform that work.

* Keep lines of communication open. USACE worked closely with other agencies, and the working relationship was great, due to their frequent communication. One GIS team leader had two teleconference meetings with FEMA and other federal and state agencies daily.

There are a variety of ways that the GIS can be used to help support disaster missions. A picture is worth a thousand words, and if that picture has a lot of useful information on it, people can relate to it.

Dr. Castagna is a technical writer/editor for the United States Army Corps of Engineers, New York District. She writes about the district's diversified civil and military projects and studies and has been published in more than 50 national and international publications. In 2004, her writing received accolades from the Department of the Army.

BioSense is a CDC initiative to support enhanced early detection, quantification, and localization of possible biologic terrorism attacks and other events of public health concern on a national level. The goals of the BioSense initiative are to advance early detection by providing the standards, infrastructure, and data acquisition for near real-time reporting, analytic evaluation and implementation, and early event detection support for state and local public health officials. BioSense collects and analyzes Department of Defense and Department of Veterans Affairs ambulatory clinical diagnoses and procedures and Laboratory Corporation of America laboratory-test orders. The application summarizes and presents analytical results and data visualizations by source, day, and syndrome for each ZIP code, state, and metropolitan area through maps, graphs, and tables. An initial proof of a concept evaluation project was conducted before the system was made available to state and local users in April 2004. User recruitment involved identifying and training BioSense administrators and users from state and local health departments. User support has been an essential component of the implementation and enhancement process. CDC initiated the BioIntelligence Center (BIC) in June 2004 to conduct internal monitoring of BioSense national data daily. BIC staff have supported state and local system monitoring, conducted data anomaly inquiries, and communicated with state and local public health officials. Substantial investments will be made in providing regional, state, and local data for early event detection and situational awareness, test beds for data and algorithm evaluation, detection algorithm development, and data management technologies, while maintaining the focus on state and local public health needs.

The BioSense Initiative

BioSense is a CDC initiative to support enhanced early detection and situational awareness for possible biologic terrorism attacks and other events of public health concern on a national level. It is the primary early event detection component of CDC's Public Health Information Network (1). BioSense Initiative goals include the advancement of analytics for pre-diagnostic and diagnostic data; collaboration with state, local, and regional systems to provide data in near-real time; increased sharing of approaches and technology among federal, state, and local levels of public health; and the promotion of national standards and specifications to ensure integration with other public health systems (2).

The BioSense software application and the BioIntelligence Center (BIC) are two key components of CDC's BioSense Initiative. The BioSense application is an Internet-based software system for collecting, analyzing, and visualizing data reported to BioSense. Since June 2004, BIC has conducted monitoring and investigation of BioSense national data daily and supports state and local system monitoring and data anomaly investigations. Although the BioSense Initiative involves broader activities in the public health context, this report is primarily focuses on surveillance use of the BioSense application.

The BioSense Application

Overview

The purpose of the BioSense application is to provide early event detection and situational awareness critical for biologic terrorism surveillance and routine public health event management. BioSense uses near-real time reporting of health data, performing analysis and data visualization techniques on diagnostic and pre-diagnostic electronic data sources and providing the results to state and local public health departments for use in detecting and characterizing events of potential public health importance. BioSense summarizes and presents analytical results and data visualizations by source, day, and syndrome for each state and metropolitan area (MRA) through maps, graphs, and tables. States and MRA jurisdictions are defined by a set of ZIP codes.

Data Sources

BioSense has implemented three national data sources: Department of Defense (DoD) Military Treatment Facilities, Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) treatment facilities, and Laboratory Corporation of American (LabCorp[R]) test orders. Approximately 700 DoD and 1,100 VA medical facilities report data to BioSense (3,4). LabCorp operates a nationwide network of 31 primary testing locations and more than 1,100 patient service centers (5). Data are received and analyzed daily and historical data are available; DoD data have been collected since May 2003; VA, December 2003; and LabCorp, June 2004. Since October 2004, the average number of daily records received for DoD has been 98,000; VA, 151,800; and LabCorp, 137,600. Both DoD and VA provide ambulatory-care data in the form of International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision, Clinical Modification (ICD-9-CM) diagnosis codes and current procedural terminology (CPT[R]) medical procedure codes. LabCorp provides test orders and ICD-9-CM codes associated with the reason for the orders. All data sources include additional information with each record (e.g., patient age, sex, ZIP code of residence, and facility identifier and ZIP code). Experts from different agencies participated in mapping each data source to 11 syndrome categories: botulism-like, fever, gastrointestinal, hemorrhagic illness, localized cutaneous lesion, lymphadenitis, neurologic, rash, respiratory, severe illness and death, and specific infection (6,7).

The ITS Peer-to-Peer Program provides free technical assistance to agencies seeking to improve transportation operations through the deployment of intelligent transportation systems (ITS). This program is designed to complement and expand the technical assistance available from the staffs of the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), Federal Transit Administration (FTA), and Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA). Any public agency that is involved in the deployment of integrated ITS technologies is eligible to receive assistance through the program.

The tenets of the Peer-to-Peer Program are to be effective, responsive, confidential, and free of charge. The effectiveness of the program stems from the knowledge and experience of more than 130 ITS experts who participate as peers and provide deployment advice. The program is responsive to satisfy time constraints identified by the client, and the majority of requests are satisfied in 30 days or less. The program is confidential for the requesting agencies, allowing them to make strategic decisions quietly without prematurely engaging the consultant community. This assistance is provided free on request to enable agencies with limited resources to participate. These characteristics of the Peer-to-Peer Program make it an attractive resource for short-term assistance needs.

The program is not new. Because of its strong focus on satisfying the needs of its clients, the program has enjoyed favorable response and participation for nearly four years.

The program enables an agency to tap into the expanding knowledge base on ITS. Deployment of ITS throughout the nation is vast and is constantly advancing, and the Peer-to-Peer Program makes it easier for an agency to find the specific ITS information that it needs. This saves the agency time and money, enabling the agency to focus more of its resources on ITS deployment.

When a request for assistance is received, program representatives assess the request and determine the appropriate support -- providing relevant reports and other material, over-the-phone advice, or a site visit. The technical capabilities of FHWA, FTA, and FMCSA are tapped as the first resource to satisfy the client's needs.

The scope of the technical expertise available through the Peer-to-Peer Program cuts across two dimensions of ITS deployment. First, the program offers technical assistance across the ITS infrastructure program areas -- metropolitan, rural and statewide, and commercial vehicle operations -- and the overarching areas of the National ITS Architecture and the National ITS Standards. Second, the program expertise covers the entire life cycle of ITS development, encompassing problems and opportunities identification, existing system assessment, concept of operations/information requirements development, system design, system testing and validation, system implementation, and system evaluation and maintenance. The ability to furnish technical assistance in all stages of ITS deployment makes the program useful to any agency -- whatever its level of ITS deployment maturity.

The program's peer experts have provided assistance on a range of issues regarding ITS deployment and the maximization of the clients' return on their ITS investments. Some representative topic areas encountered in the program are:

* Planning and Programming/Procurement.

* Operations and Maintenance.

* Resource Materials Location.

* Partnerships/Cost-Sharing Issues.

* Education/Training/Facilitation.

* Awareness/Outreach.

* Design and Installation Specifications.

* Modeling and Simulation.

* Information Technology (Hardware and Software) and Telecommunications.

Clients include the offices of FHWA, FTA, and FMCSA; the headquarters and district offices of state departments of transportation; transit authorities; turnpike and tollway authorities; metropolitan planning organizations; city and county transportation and public works offices; and transportation management agencies.

The majority of the more than 130 ITS professional peers who lend their expertise to the Peer-to-Peer Program represent public agencies that have had experience in ITS deployment. The peers from the public sector are of great value to the program. They demonstrate to clients that ITS can be successfully deployed, giving clients a measure of confidence. Public sector peers also promote the technical assistance resources available through FHWA, FTA, and FMCSA when they describe their experiences.

Only a small portion of the program's peers come from the private sector; nevertheless, private sector peers are particularly helpful in the newer technical areas for which public support is not yet available.

New peers are being added continuously to the program through nomination or self-nomination, introducing additional expertise to the collection of available knowledge.

The program's success is evidenced by the growing number of requests for assistance. Approximately 420 requests have been received and processed since the program's inception in June 1996. The number of requests has increased at a rate of nearly 5 percent per year.