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USGS Budget and Science Information System Plus. Reston , VA (BASIS+) Summary: enGenius is working with the DOI’s Science Bureau to develop and maintain an automated Bureau enterprise system that supports project work plan formulation, budget-development, and budget tracking. Problem USGS was using many disparate systems for tracking its project plans, project budgeting information and account and funding information. These systems were using old technologies, were not scalable and could not adapt easily to the changing business needs of USGS. Also, in many instances they would have redundant data sets. The management and administration costs were very high. USGS needed a complete overhaul of these systems. A new scalable web-based architecture and infrastructure was needed which would consolidate on these disparate systems and deliver a one source system for these needs. Approach BASIS+ is a web-based information system used to capture project work plans, project budgets, account and funding information. The overall purpose of BASIS+ is to provide a single administrative system for all of USGS to use for project and financial planning. The functional goals of BASIS+ are to combine the tasks of project management, budget tracking, fund management, account management and staff management into a process that allows the users to build project budgets, narratives and goals into a project plan with query and reporting capabilities for standard and ad hoc reports. BASIS+ has improved efficiencies by consolidating bureau project planning, project budgeting, and performance tracking into a single system. This consolidation resulted in improved management and reporting, and a cost savings of maintaining many disparate and outdated project information systems. BASIS+, in conjunction with expanded usage of another system named FFS, has replaced a number of systems in use in the USGS performing similar functions and has reduced redundant usage of systems. enGenius joined BASIS+ project in May, 2002 as a contracting company to provide system development and Oracle database administrative support thanks to enGenius employees’ expertise in Oracle products. EnGenius is currently working on upgrading the current infrastructure to the latest versions. This includes the following: Oracle Database Enterprise Server migration from 8i to 10g, Oracle Application Server upgrade from 9i release 1 to 10g, Oracle Designer upgrade from 6i to 10g and Oracle Reports upgrade from 6i to 10g. enGenius consultants brought the quality services to USGS not only by providing superior maintenance support but also by being able to identify security holes of the system caused by the initial design and supplying quick solutions. Technical Details: BASIS+ is a PL/SQL web application with Oracle Application Server serving as the middle tier and Oracle database as the data server. There are two Sun 450 boxes for application servers. One is the primary application server and the other one acts as slave report server. The database is running on a two-node failover system using Fujitsu 650 as primary server, Sun V880 as the spare server and Sun StorEdge as the shared storage. Solaris 8 is the standard OS for all boxes. Results The newly deployed BASIS+ Oracle powered system resulted in vastly improved management and reporting capabilities. A single point of administration and maintenance has led to significant cost savings. Data redundancy has been eliminated which has resulted in higher quality of data and better accuracy. The new scalable architecture allows this system to be enhanced to meet the ever changing business needs and has also boosted performance and system availability. Accessibility has improved by the web based access, which means the system can be accessed from anywhere anytime – the only requirement being a PC and a web-browser. This in turn has resulted in improved customer satisfaction.
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