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GCN Home > 10/11/04 issue

Nelson applies an enterprise view to EPA’s systems strategy

By David Essex, GCN Staff

A single, apt metaphor could help explain the success of Kim Nelson, CIO of the Environmental Protection Agency and recipient of GCN’s Civilian Executive of the Year award.

As the federal agency responsible for protecting ecosystems, Nelson says EPA has learned to think of itself as an ecosystem and to conduct IT strategy at an enterprise level. “It’s almost natural,” she says. “We manage an ecosystem.”

That philosophy has, since Nelson came on board in November 2001, helped keep EPA at the forefront of the federal government’s efforts to improve data sharing within and among agencies, simplify enterprise architectures and boost e-gov services to citizens.

EPA is the lead agency for E-Rulemaking, one of the Office of Management and Budget’s 25 Quicksilver projects, which is expected to provide a centralized portal for citizen input into rulemaking by 2005.

Another major initiative will consolidate 46 records-management systems on a single platform, beginning with a pilot next year. By the end of this year, EPA plans to unveil the Central Data Exchange, the entry point for the agency’s Environmental Information Exchange Network that will let states’ environmental agencies and others submit and access data.

Nelson, who serves as co-chair of the CIO Council’s Architecture and Infrastructure Committee, calls CDX, winner this year of a GCN agency award, one of her proudest achievements.

The project had its share of challenges. The vision for the network, first formulated five years ago, was to apply the then-ascendant e-commerce model to the federal government. But with the dot-com crash, private-sector development slowed on the registry needed to manage posting of data to the exchange.

“We had to do it all ourselves,” Nelson recalled, adding that poor interoperability among third-party Web services tools made the job harder. “When you’re on the leading edge, this is what happens.”

Now, 13 states already have nodes on the network and are employing Extensible Markup Language specifications supplied by EPA to post data. Despite the early problems, Nelson is extremely high on Web services’ potential.

“It will happen,” she said. “I think it has an incredible future.”

She cited the CDX air-quality portal, expected to go online for co-regulators by the end of this year, as a good example of effective integration of EPA’s enterprise architecture.

Nelson seems comfortable in describing her role as that of manager, not technologist. She has a bachelor’s degree in political science and secondary education from Pennsylvania’s Shippensburg University, and a master’s in public administration from the University of Pennsylvania.

More news on related topics: Business Process Management, E-Government, IT in Action, Knowledge Management, Management