E-Travel is basically a portal/software exchange that provides a centralized location for all organizational travel to be planned, booked, and managed. The GSA is requiring that all Federal agencies move to E-Travel. The agencies have until March to submit their migration plan, and until 2006 to complete the transition. The GSA is requiring agencies to choose between three approved software packages.
This is a great idea, and will can save much time and money. The only more significant travel savings would be from a distributed workspace system, but this is a start.
Still, having worked on a corporate E-Travel migration (that would be probably be similar in size to even some of the larger of Executive agencies), I have to say that this transition should take months, not two years.
It is staggering to hear, but US portal FirstGov does not currently use a Content Management System (CMS). Each page on the site is hand-coded, but not for much longer. the General Services Administration recently signed a half million dollar contract for use of Vignette's CMS software.
To illustrate why a CMS is so important, here is a quote from M.J. Jameson, s GSA associate administrator:
"When the Columbia shuttle tragedy happened, we took 24 hours to get up what we needed to get up," Jameson said. "If we had had this content management system, the people who do that for FirstGov could have done it from home within 20 minutes."
Not only do CMSs save time and money, they allow the technically illititerate to update without calling in tech support, the dynamic generation of content, and easier changes to design/site architecture. I'm really shocked they would still be hand-coding.
The license is governmentwide, which is also pretty amazing. Any government agency that is still hand-coding is wasting money, and should be strongly encouraged to make the move to Vignette as soon as possible (not that I have any pull in that regard).