PERSONNEL SERVICE
PERSONNEL SERVICE
Air Force Center Incorporates IT Solutions to Become a
Virtual Personnel Office with Global Reach and Around-the-Clock Service.
by Harrison Donnelly, MIT Editor
Not so long ago, Air Force personnel a straightforward, if not always convenient, method—they went to the base personnel office and looked at their file of paper records.
Thanks to a massive scanning job overseen by the Air Force Personnel Center (AFPC), however, airmen now can access Web. completed an 18-month project of paper-toelectronic transformation of 10.5 million documents for active duty personnel, and work on Guard and Reserve records is currently underway.
The records consolidation was part of a larger AFPC initiative to use technology to anywhere, on the mission and their families.
Centralizing the support at AFPC, which is based at Randolph Air Force Base, Texas, as a service center has been a new way of thinking for the personnel community. The center incorporated IT solutions to become a virtual personnel office with global reach seeking their employment information had their records from anywhere at any time via the Web The center this summer com deliver customer service anytime and anywhere allowing airmen more time to focus and around-the-clock service. For the halfmillion active duty military and civilian customers, that meant they no longer have to stand in line to update records, but can do so from their desks or phones.
The initial virtual experience begins as a Web application, or “tier zero,” where airmen can process a number of personnel actions such as applying for separation or retirement. If they have questions on status or new programs, there is a 24-hour contact center available to them.
The Air Force Contact Center, launched in 2006, is the second of three tiers in the integrated center. It is designed to streamline the processes and create efficiencies to focus AFPC’s efforts on convenient customer service.
The product line leader, or third tier, provides program expertise when needed. The line leaders, who are personnel experts, manage the design, production, marketing and implementation product lines. With the expert in the loop during the entire construct of the product line, emphasis is placed on delivery and execution.
DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT
AFPC officials deployed several different technologies to create the new system. The electronic records, for example, are made accessible via a Web-based document management system using an Oracle RDBMS, OpenText (formerly Hummingbird) Document Management Software suite, and custom Visual Basic and Active Server Pages applications. It utilizes storage area network technology to store more than 30 million documents in TIFF, PDF and XFDL formats.
The Website was redesigned with a customer service suite from Right Now Technologies, which includes both case management and knowledge management. As Jeannie Odom, Virtual Personnel Services Center program manager, explained, “What we decided to do was build up a structure to track cases, as well as presenting a knowledge management front end via the Web, so that if there are frequently asked questions, folks can log on and get to those without having to make a phone call at all. They can also submit their questions via the same portal, which go straight to the Contact Center.
“We also redesigned our Website to incorporate the look and feel of a knowledge management system, where you type in a question and have answers pop up, based on key words in your question,” Odom continued. “Eventually, we had the process owners take over the ownership of that knowledge as well. As new policies and questions came about, they could put knowledge out on the Web to mitigate the number of calls that they got about hot issues.”
The center had a legacy analog phone system at the time, but wanted to be able to incorporate multiple geographic locations to take care of the total force concept for the future. So it installed a Cisco Voice over IP infrastructure with a call management system, which will enable data integration with the telephony solution.
One result of the new system has been a reduction in the amount of time that it takes to do an application. While in the past it took an average of three weeks for an application for a personnel change to reach the center, it now takes only about two weeks, thus saving a third of the time for an application.
Perhaps even more importantly, the new system is increasing accuracy and reliability throughout the personnel process.
“For the Air Force as a whole, you’re getting a single source of information,” noted Jacqueline Harry, branch chief for plans and programs. “So you’re not getting 81 different bases giving you 81 different answers, but answers from one central location, from the people who will be making the decisions on your application. You won’t have someone locally telling you to do something, and then the actual decision-maker saying that that was wrong. The answers are from the single source that’s going to make the decisions in the end.” ♦
