“By using the NIH Enterprise Architecture during planning for a project, my team and I were able to research and understand the technical concepts associated with document management and workflow tools without having to spend a lot of extra time and effort. The information was already on the website and easy to find.”
- Human Resources Specialist, Office of Human Resources
Case Study
A Human Resources (HR) Specialist in the Office of Human Resources (OHR), who is responsible for HR systems administration, was able to use the NIH Enterprise Architecture to increase her understanding of workflow and document management solutions.
Specifically, OHR had a requirement to find a solution to track personnel actions in order to provide better HR services to NIH employees. The solution would also have to track and management documents and forms associated with the personnel actions.
During her research on the enterprisearchitecture.nih.gov website, she was able to learn how document management fit into a Workflow Service Pattern. She was also able to share this information with her team, thereby increasing organizational knowledge and creating a common understanding of document management and workflow concepts.
Furthermore, she was able to arrive at a recommendation to the department, based on the information provided in the Document Management Tools Brick, in terms of what technologies would likely work at NIH, given the current operational and technical environment.
In the end she was able to save time and money associated with the research into a solution, because the information was already available online. She was able to increase her team’s knowledge. And she was able to reuse existing patterns from another part of NIH that is published in the NIH Architecture Library, rather than recreating a design from scratch.