The Federal Commons is an e-business system that will provide the federal grantee community – such as research universities, non-profit organizations, and others – a common system to perform grant application and administration functions across numerous federal agencies. The customer set includes the National Institute of Health and the National Science Foundation.

RTI is designing and developing the system architecture and framework that will allow the agency legacy systems and databases (mainframe and other) to be integrated into a single system. The goal is to streamline grant-related processes, while reusing existing systems as much as possible, in order to increase efficiency for both federal agencies and the grantee community. This is done by reducing paperwork, manual processing, duplication of effort, and increasing the sharing of resources.

It will provide an easy to use Web-based interface, relying on HTML; data interchange will be enabled via XML; and CORBA and SSL provide reliable and secure data transfer. Distributed Java applications tie it all together.

The challenges that we have faced in Federal Commons are no different than those that face any business or government agency wishing to take advantage of distributed e-solutions. These include getting agreements among many groups (partners, suppliers, and/or federal agencies). Dealing with integration of legacy systems. And understanding that things will change, and when they do, you do not want to have to throw out the infrastructure that is in place.

To deal with these challenges, RTI E-Solutions has relied on open standards; used pilot projects to demonstrate capabilities as we've gone forward; and using an organic, evolutionary design.