Stories

Paving the road to success

A Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) software project — the result of a Y‑12 Complementary Work program — was recently named one of the top 20 programs in the 2006 Excellence.Gov awards. The Industry Advisory Council's Collaboration and Transformation Shared Interest Group presents these awards to programs that demonstrate the best practices in information sharing for federally led information technology program implementations.

In the mid-1990s, FHWA was looking for a platform to help with knowledge management. The Y‑12 National Security Complex (the production side of the partnership) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (the research side) created and managed a system comprising more than 30 databases, which helps people in FHWA — or any U.S. Department of Transportation organization — search and find experts in a particular area. The web-based system fosters a “communities of practice” concept and is dedicated to the open exchange of information important to the transportation community.

“Y-12 has achieved its goal in the FHWA partnership because we've reached the point where we're turning the ‘keys’ over to a privately owned company,” Steve Payne of Technical Computing said.

The FHWA project brought several challenges to Y‑12 computer engineers. “Moving from the Y‑12 internal network to the data management zone was a challenge — especially after 9/11, when security increased nationwide,” explained Mona Gupta, project manager. “Our project was one of the first to move to the DMZ [demilitarized zone, or servers accessible to Internet traffic], so we had to overcome issues that were brand new.

“The audience of the project is so large,” she concluded. “The whole infrastructure of the country relies on highways and the making of new ones.”

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