"A Unified Federal Government Electronic Mail Users' Support Environment" (M.U.S.E. Report) conveys a vision that is widely supported by government program/mission parties who are the "end-users" of information technology services. It has taken a full year and many hundreds of volunteer person-days to develop. It reflects views not only of agency professionals in the government's electronic commerce community, the government's information access and dissemination community, the government's mission delivery community for such activities as benefits and health care, and the government's IRM applications development community, but also of a great many Federal agency professionals charged with providing electronic mail services to those end-users and applications developers. This report is not a system design. It is a vision of an infrastructure to support recommendations in the National Performance Review and in the National Information Infrastructure concerning the re-engineering of the gov- ernment's business processes. It contains functional statements of what is needed to migrate the delivery of services now using the paper mails to delivery via the electronic mode of operation known as electronic mail. The functional statements include a comprehensive set of operational characteristics at what telecommunications professionals call the "application layer." Questions, comments, and feedback in general (pro and con) are most desired. Please direct them to the chairman of the group that developed the report, Dan Schneider, who can be contacted by telephone at 202-514-4318, or by fax at 202-514-1534, or to group member rkissel@noaa.gov. FINAL REPORT of the Working Group on Government-wide Electronic Mail, Integrated Services Panel: A UNIFIED FEDERAL GOVERNMENT ELECTRONIC MAIL USERS' SUPPORT ENVIRONMENT (M.U.S.E.) What is it? Why is it needed? How to launch it? November, 1993 Part I: Report Text Part II: Questions and Answers for Agency Personnel Part III: Some Scenarios Part IV: Operational Characteristics of the M.U.S.E. BACKGROUND This report was prepared by a group of information technology professionals from several Executive Branch Departments and Agencies, who invested their energies voluntarily in the hope of bringing about a major innovation in the way the Federal Government conducts its daily business and delivers its daily services. The group worked under the auspices of the Integrated Services Panel, an interagency voluntary activity sponsored by the Federal Information Resources Management Policy Council. Since beginning our efforts in October 1992, the group has met more than twenty times, heard from speakers, conducted interviews, and visited parties who are pursuing major efforts in "corporate" electronic messaging. They also conferred with leading professionals in electronic commerce, information retrieval, agency computer application systems, and agency service delivery. In April, 1993, they issued a Preliminary Report, which was distributed widely and reviewed by many persons. Several comments were received and studied. Additionally, the group conducted a series of interviews with senior managers in twelve Executive Branch organizations to gain further insights to plans and needs for electronic services to citizens and the re-engineering of business processes from paper to electronics. This Final Report is the product of the year-long endeavor. The members of the working group who developed this report, and the agencies where they work, are as follows: Greg Bergren NSA Dave Bittenbender EPA Chuck Chamberlain USPS Joe DeBuzna DOT Sam Ewell Treas. Paul Grant DOD Hampton Hoge USDA John Jones DOI Ed Kemon VA Rich Kissel DOC Pat Kristobek AID John Migliaccio GSA Marion Royal GSA Dan Schneider (Chair) DOJ Tom Thompson HHS Marie Tynan NASA Appreciation is expressed to the many others who assisted us during the past twelve months. We are particularly grateful to Jack Bartley, DOD/Acquisition, for his support regarding electronic commerce. We thank our agencies for their support of our participation in this effort, but it should be understood that our agencies take no official position with respect to the contents of this report. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction The Problem, and Its Solution The Business Case: Capabilities and Benefits Design and Importance of the Directory Possible Implementation Strategies Appendices: 1. Summer, 1993, Agency Interviewees 2. Other Persons Interviewed, Visited, or Consulted 3. Parties Who Commented on the Preliminary Report INTRODUCTION This report is significant because it proposes a capability which can dramatically affect how the Federal Government delivers its services to the Nation, with great benefits to both citizens and businesses. Implementation of this proposal will lead to better and faster finding of the right Federal office for a particular citizen/business need, to better and faster finding of Federal Government information, to better, faster and less expensive delivery of services, and to better, faster and less expensive conduct of procurement activities. There is no precedent for doing what this report proposes, because there is no precedent for the Electronic Age. We are advocating the creation of a new electronic means of communication for service delivery and for the performance of the activities of the Federal Government. That new means will be an extremely important enabling mechanism for business process re-engineering and re-invention throughout the Federal Government, including the transition to electronic commerce. The vision of this report isn't fantasy, and it isn't a global approach to all electronic communication. It takes one specific, established form of electronic communication and views it across the whole Federal Government. It cuts across agencies and Branches of the government, but it doesn't cut across technologies. The particular technology involved happens to be exceptionally powerful. Just implementing that one capability in a unified way across all Federal agencies can make an enormous impact on the productivity of the government and the speed and quality of its service delivery activities. This report is an infrastructure visualization, an architectural design - not an engineering blueprint, for a Unified Electronic Mail Users' Support Environment. For want of a better name, we call it the M.U.S.E. The Federal Government can build it within the next few years. We believe that the investment will be paid back many-fold in greatly improved services to the American people, in substantially reduced costs of delivering those services, and in such economic benefits to the nation as major reductions in paperwork burdens on business. This report is consistent with and supportive of both the National Performance Review (NPR) recommendations, and the recommended actions for a National Information Infrastructure (NII). In addition, this report sets forth a communications environment needed for the architecture for electronic commerce, as called for in President Clinton's memorandum of October 26, 1993, "Streamlining Procurement Through Electronic Commerce." Very few single initiatives will make as great a contribution towards the goals expressed in those materials as will the creation of the M.U.S.E. Part I: A Unified Federal Government Electronic Mail Users' Support Environment -- Report Text TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction The Problem, and Its Solution The Business Case: Capabilities and Benefits Design and Importance of the Directory Possible Implementation Strategies Appendices: 1. Summer, 1993, Agency Interviewees 2. Other Persons Interviewed, Visited, or Consulted 3. Parties Who Commented on the Preliminary Report INTRODUCTION This report is significant because it proposes a capability which can dramatically affect how the Federal Government delivers its services to the Nation, with great benefits to both citizens and businesses. Implementation of this proposal will lead to better and faster finding of the right Federal office for a particular citizen/business need, to better and faster finding of Federal Government information, to better, faster and less expensive delivery of services, and to better, faster and less expensive conduct of procurement activities. There is no precedent for doing what this report proposes, because there is no precedent for the Electronic Age. We are advocating the creation of a new electronic means of communication for service delivery and for the performance of the activities of the Federal Government. That new means will be an extremely important enabling mechanism for business process re-engineering and re-invention throughout the Federal Government, including the transition to electronic commerce. The vision of this report isn't fantasy, and it isn't a global approach to all electronic communication. It takes one specific, established form of electronic communication and views it across the whole Federal Government. It cuts across agencies and Branches of the government, but it doesn't cut across technologies. The particular technology involved happens to be exceptionally powerful. Just implementing that one capability in a unified way across all Federal agencies can make an enormous impact on the productivity of the government and the speed and quality of its service delivery activities. This report is an infrastructure visualization, an architectural design - not an engineering blueprint, for a Unified Electronic Mail Users' Support Environment. For want of a better name, we call it the M.U.S.E. The Federal Government can build it within the next few years. We believe that the investment will be paid back many-fold in greatly improved services to the American people, in substantially reduced costs of delivering those services, and in such economic benefits to the nation as major reductions in paperwork burdens on business. This report is consistent with and supportive of both the National Performance Review (NPR) recommendations, and the recommended actions for a National Information Infrastructure (NII). In addition, this report sets forth a communications environment needed for the architecture for electronic commerce, as called for in President Clinton's memorandum of October 26, 1993, "Streamlining Procurement Through Electronic Commerce." Very few single initiatives will make as great a contribution towards the goals expressed in those materials as will the creation of the M.U.S.E. THE PROBLEM, AND ITS SOLUTION To understand why the M.U.S.E. is needed, we must understand what electronic mail is, how it differs from other electronic activities, and what its key chacteristics are for successful use among different organizations. Electronic Mail, or Messaging Whether one chooses to use the term "electronic mail" or "electronic messaging," they both refer to a specific technology or manner of communication. Information in one form or another is put into an electronic "envelope" and sent through the electronic equivalent of the postal system. This is called a "store and forward" arrangement, because the information is sent to a service point where it is momentarily "stored" while the service point is determining what should be done with it. The service point then "forwards" it to another service point, where the process is repeated; and so on until the information reaches its final destination. That's what the postal system does with the letters we mail. The local postmaster collects them at the letter drop and takes them to a sorting facility. From there they may go to another sorting facility at the destination city, by which they finally get into a delivery route. Logically, the electronic process is the same as the postal process, but tremendously faster. This "store-and-forward" process is technologically different from the way we make airline reservations, or buy tickets, or conduct most banking activities. In these, we are directly "on-line" to a computer data base, causing instantaneous change to the data stored there. This is known as interactive "transaction processing." The world of computers and communications has many other processes besides these two, and while they may share communications services, the processes themselves operate differently. A particular process can be used for many different purposes, or "applications." Interactive transaction processing is used for banking applications, ticket reservation applications, retail sales applications, and many governmental applications such as motor vehicle registration. Electronic mail is another process which happens to be incredibly versatile with respect to the applications for which it can be used. Almost every professional person, office worker, researcher, academician, and student knows how electronic mail works for interpersonal messaging within their organizations. They're so familiar with it that they call it by its popular nickname, "e-mail." Many use it also to communicate with parties outside their organizations. What they don't all know is that e-mail isn't limited to interpersonal messaging. Electronic mail, like the postal mail, can transport much more than letters. It can transport empty forms, filled- in forms, business documents, data, facsimile images, even recorded voice and bulk-mailed advertisements. In short, it can transport almost any form in which information can be expressed. This capability to move information electronically the way the postal system moves paper mail is leading to the re- engineering of business activities to send data electronically instead of on paper. The new activities and re-engineered processes are called "mail-enabled applications." These new or re-engineered applications are possible only to the extent that the e-mail environment can support them. That environment is external to the applications themselves, and that environment is what this report addresses. Just as the information capacity of e-mail is ubiquitous, so is the geographic spread of its reach. International corporations routinely send e-mail between their offices around the globe. Domestic telecommunications carriers such as AT&T, MCI, and SPRINT, offer e-mail to anyone with access to the telephone network. Businesses use their e- mail services, called "value-added networks" or "VANs," to exchange purchase orders, delivery acknowledgements, and invoices. Freshmen students exchange e-mail with their former high school chums now at different colleges, and with their parents at home, over systems like Prodigy and CompuServe. Scientists around the world exchange e-mail over the Internet. The Problem, and the Challenge Each e-mail environment is unique. They're all store-and- forward processes, but mechanically and operationally, each does it in its own way. Prodigy is different from CompuServe is different from AT&T Mail is different from MCI Mail is different from SprintMail is different from the Internet, etc. It doesn't stop there, because organizations - be they Fortune 500 corporations or municipalities or states or Federal agencies - have their own internal e-mail systems, each with its own directory support, security requirements, and operational procedures. Most internal systems have been implemented using commercial off-the-shelf products, such as those marketed by the Lotus, Microsoft, WordPerfect, and Digital Equipment Corporations, and dozens more which compete fiercely in the ever-expanding market. And how do they compete? By being different, of course, one from the other. So what are user organizations, such as government agencies, to do? They really have no choice but to address their own missions and let their sister agencies do likewise. As a result, each Federal agency looks to do what it can within its own boundaries, with the inevitable result that each one's e-mail environment is unique. The real problem here isn't so much that one agency can't exchange e-mail with all the others as freely as within itself, but that each is reaching out on its own, uniquely, to THE SAME parties outside the Federal Government in the course of delivering its services. Thus we have the prospect of HUD building its own e-mail environment to interchange information with its state and local constituents, Education doing the same for its clients, Labor doing likewise, Justice focusing on law enforcement entities, Agriculture with farmers, Social Security Administration with businesses and senior citizen centers, etc. Figure 1 depicts what the Federal Government is actively building today. Each arrangement is separate and distinct. This problem isn't unique to the Federal Government. Every state and local government, every non-government organization, and every business enterprise faces exactly the same problem, throughout the United States, and in most other nations throughout the world. How Governments Solved the Problem for Paper Communications Originally, before national postal services, if someone wanted to conduct business across a distance, the party had to find a courier, make arrangements with the courier, including paying the particular courier's charges, and take his chances with delivery. If a dispute followed, in which the receiver of a business communication - such as an offer - said the sender's offer arrived too late, the sender was out of luck unless his courier could prove in court that the receiver was lying. Many years ago, national governments created postal systems to support commerce and communications within their borders. The systems provided certain specified and reliable services at uniform prices. In the United States, Congress created the postal system, mandating a specific mission to collect and deliver mail everywhere, both urban and rural, and establishing regulatory counterbalances to its monopoly powers. To fulfill its mission, the postal system (1) established, together with local authorities, mechanisms for ensuring unique addresses for the places to which mail is delivered; (2) published directories to support the finding of those addresses; (3) issued rules and regulations to govern the collection, handling and delivery of mail; (4) implemented, with the support of legislative authorities, enforcement mechanisms to guarantee the integrity of its services; (5) built, acquired and operated the physical resources needed for the sorting and transport of the mail; (6) employed and trained the human resources needed to collect, sort, transport and deliver the mail; and (7) set the fees and implemented the sales, financial and accounting procedures required by a business endeavor. Telephony followed a similar history. At one time, this land was dotted with telephone companies, each serving its immediate geographic area with its own procedures, rules and regulations. Gradually, the Nation was united by a single telephone "system," which enjoyed a monopoly status. Operationally, what gave the United States perhaps the best telephone system on earth was uniqueness and uniformity in numbering and signalling, plus directory publication and directory assistance services, together with a physical plant (circuits and switches) designed and built for capacity, reliability, and quality. Recent years have seen the introduction of some private sector competition into the monopoly environments of postal and telephone services. What isn't often thought about, is that both of those environments must have and keep certain infrastructure properties in order to make competition possible. Unique postal addressing and telephone numbering is one. Maps and directories for finding those addresses and their locations is another. Standards for signalling is a third. Legal protections and expectations is a fourth. None of this exists today for e-mail for the Federal Government as a whole, and with the parties to whom it must deliver services and with whom it must conduct business. The Legal Dimension It's not unusual for technologists to focus on issues of technical design and mechanics, and operational specialists to focus on issues of data design and manipulation. That's because we all take for granted the legal environment that is inherent in the postal system (and to a degree also in the telephone system). That legal environment is essential to the functioning in our American society of both commerce and the conduct of the activities of government. Government programs and activities often have time limits or deadlines. Adverse consequences can be attached to those limits, for example, interest and penalties assessed for the late filing of tax returns. Failure to meet a government-imposed deadline for filing a form with the Securities and Exchange Commission or submitting a proposal on a multi-million-dollar competitive procurement can cost a private sector enterprise many millions of dollars. The operation of our Nation's judicial system is based entirely on rules that set time limits for actions. The failure to meet a dealine for filing a paper with a court can - and often does - cause a party to lose its case. The time-limit aspects of government activities are supported by and rooted in law. Their consequences are enforceable in the courts. For this reason, their promulgation must be accordance with formal, prescribed procedures for issuing rules and regulations. The information technologists who build and support the information systems for government mission activities may never deal with the lawyers who write, publish, and enforce the rules and regulations to the public that govern the operation of the activities, but those rules and regulations are every bit as essential to the success of the activities as are the information systems. Rules and regulations dealing with time limits and deadlines for information handling must have three basic infrastructure elements to back them up. The first is a uniform, objective, and neutral method of determining when something has occurred, such that all parties to a transaction can rely equally upon it. The second is a reliable mode of information transport, such that all parties to a transaction can depend equally upon it. The third is tangible evidence produced in the infrastructure that will be admissible and credible in legal proceedings. Examples of the first and third are postal system postmarks and receipts. Whenever this report refers to "business-quality" e-mail, it means e-mail that supports the legal requirements of government activities. Those requirements focus on the dependability of transport, the freedom from tampering, and the reliability of the receipts and indicia of handling. The definition of "business-quality" is in law. The implementation is in technology. Much of this report, and the Operational Characteristics that accompany it, address the electronic counterparts to the postal system postmark, delivery receipt, and integrity and dependability of transport. The Operational Characteristics are intended to create an electronic infrastructure for electronic information movement that is comparable in its commercial and legal dimensions to what the postal system infrastructure provides for paper movement. The Two Operational Parts of Mail Environments In the familiar environment of ordinary postal mail, letters can be written in long-hand, typed on a manual or electric typewriter, prepared in a word processor or a personal computer or on a workstation in a local network, purchased in a card shop, etc. They're put into envelopes, which - in big organizations - get picked up by the internal mail/messenger service and taken to the organization's Mail Room. In the Mail Room, they get bundled or put into outgoing mail sacks that are picked up by an employee of the United States Postal Service (USPS) or are taken to some collection point arranged with the Postal Service. We haven't the faintest idea what actually happens to those big mail sacks once they leave our organization's Mail Room, nor do we care. Somehow their contents get dumped out and wind up in mail sacks in other cities, which Postal Service employees lug into the Mail Rooms of the organizations in which our addressees work. The sacks get emptied there, and their contents are sorted and routed through our addressees' campuses or buildings, such that each letter gets to its intended receiver. In the commercial/legal context, time limits or deadlines are associated with when a submitter, filer, or offeror delivers an item to a designated or mutually-agreed third party transporter (usually the USPS), or with the moment when the item is received at a designated place of arrival. In the government environment, the former is typically associated with a postal system postmark; whereas the latter is associated with a form of date/time stamp in a clerical office. Like the postal mail environment, e-mail may be thought of in terms of two parts. The first is what we view at our workstations, laptop computers, or "personal communicators" when we create messages, when we send them, when we see what's waiting for us to read, when we chose which to read or process or ignore, when we store them in our own "mailboxes" or "files," when we retrieve them from those mailboxes or files, and when we get rid of them. This set of rich functionalities with which we interact and control personally is called our "User Agent." It has a "look and feel." Once we create a message and decide to dispatch it, we tell our User Agent to send it, whereupon it gets handed off to a "Message Transfer Agent," who takes it from there. If our local Transfer Agent can't put it directly into the receiver's incoming mailbox, the Transfer Agent will have to give it to some other Transfer Agent. Our message could go through a series of Transfer Agents until it finally reaches the one which can stuff it into the mailbox of our intended receiver. Once there, the receiver's User Agent will alert the receiver and make the message available for reading, replying, forwarding, filing, and whatever other functionalities are supported. The Two Substantive Parts of Mail Environments Not that long ago, document communication didn't involve envelopes. The originator wrote out the document - perhaps an offer to buy or sell something, folded it, applied a seal of wax, and dispatched it via some courier. The envelope is a more recent development, along with the national postal service. Mail today has evolved to have two substantive parts: the letter, document, or other information object; and the envelope and transport which conveys it to the intended receiver. This report does not deal with what is inside envelopes. It deals exclusively with the electronic infrastructure environment for the envelopes and their transport. When such terms as "interface" appear, they are intended to be read with respect only to enveloping and transport, and not to the preparation or reading of e-mail contents. Furthermore, when this report speaks of "enveloping," it doesn't mean the entry of the data to create the envelope. What a human sees with its eyes and does with its fingers (the "look and feel") to cause the creation of an envelope is of no concern to this report. All that this report cares about are (1) the fully-prepared envelope that must be transported and delivered, as that envelope is handed to the M.U.S.E.'s transfer agent from some agency or non- Federal e-mail system, and (2) the directory information and services that the M.U.S.E. provides to those agency and non-Federal e-mail systems. Viewed across the government as a whole, e-mail contents are prescribed or defined by individual agency parties in the course of mission activities. If a particular contents, as required by a particular mission or business activity, needs specific user agent technology, that becomes a matter for the agency involved, together with its clients. The government-wide matter is the enveloping and transport, and the directory services needed to support those functions. The Electronic Environment Dilemma Suppose there were no U.S. Postal Service, no ZIP codes, and no uniform scheme for addressing. Suppose also that "MO" could stand for both Missouri and Montana. Suppose further that the private courier companies that delivered to Missouri didn't deliver to Montana, and vice versa. Suppose additionally that all the private courier companies had their own pricing schemes, and that if one had to hand off an item to another along the way, that some method had to be devised for us to pay the combined costs. Suppose further that many, but not all, state governments were setting up postal systems for their state offices and state-supported institutions such as colleges, but weren't including the private sector businesses, churches, or homes in their states. Suppose also that some cities were setting up municipal postal systems independent of any other postal systems, which would carry mail between such municipal facilities as schools and libraries, but which wouldn't service businesses, churches or homes. Suppose that, for the country as a whole, there were hundreds of "postal" or courier systems, some "free," some not free, not one of which picked up and delivered mail at all possible addresses throughout the Nation. Suppose that they used different addressing schemes, different pricing schemes, and didn't all cooperate with one another. Suppose further that each had one or more address directories for its customer set, but that the address directories were all arranged differently, had different ways of showing addresses, and used address codes or abbreviations that had no meaning outside their own systems. In today's world of e-mail, the Federal Government faces all of this. Is it any wonder that each Federal Government agency is struggling to find its own solution for its own mission or program needs? This may present wonderful business opportunities for dozens of private sector companies, but is it great for the Federal Government as a whole, and for the Nation it serves? Do we really want to see a result where anyone doing business in the United States would be required, for example, to use CompuServe for e-mail with the Securities and Exchange Commission, America On-line for the Federal Trade Commission, AT&T EasyLink for the Transportation Department, MCI Mail for the Treasury Department, the Internet for NASA, and SprintMail for the Justice Department, not to mention having to observe different rules, regulations and procedures associated with each agency? Is this what the Federal Government wants to foster, or what American Industry and the fifty states want to see happen? Possible Solutions Only two solutions make sense. One can be implemented by the Federal Government without legislation, giving both the private sector and the non-Federal public sector the latitudes they seem to want. The other, simpler and more elegant, would require legislation for which there is no present impetus. The first solution is the M.U.S.E., which the Federal Government can create without special enabling legislation. The second solution would be to create a national electronic equivalent to the U.S. Postal Service (USPS). The national solution would contract for physical circuits all over the country, and would install its own switches and routers, thereby blanketing the Nation and providing the same ubiquity for e-mail that the USPS provides for postal mail. The circuits would be for national electronic mail what the highways and air routes are for the USPS, and the switches and routers would be the electronic counterparts to the postal mail sorting facilities. The new national system would establish classes of electronic mail, extra services, etc., and would guarantee service to every nook and cranny in the land, regardless how remote. Aunt Minnie would be served as well electronically as she is today for greeting cards and utility bills. Federal Government agencies would use the new national system just as they now use the USPS. As appealing as this might sound, it doesn't seem to be even remotely on the horizon. Congress would need to establish it as either a part of the USPS or as a new entity, and there is no talk today of such an action. The M.U.S.E. As this discussion implies, the M.U.S.E. would be an electronic counterpart to the postal service, supporting Federal Government agencies. It would establish whatever rules and regulations it needs, set up its mail sorting and transport capabilities, and be accountable for its performance. It would pick up mail at all Federal sites regardless of location, and would deliver mail to all Federal sites regardless of location. Unlike the USPS which also collects mail in every nook and cranny of the land and delivers it to every home and business, the M.U.S.E. would leave the non-Federal part of the picture to private sector and state and local mail systems. One might think of the M.U.S.E. as an electronic cloud into which anyone outside the Federal Government could send a piece of e-mail, and have it delivered to any Federal Government addressee regardless where that addressee might be located. Unlike the USPS which is a single mail cloud for everyone in the Nation, the M.U.S.E. would be a single cloud for the whole Federal Government only. Everyone outside the Federal Government must fend for themselves as best they can. That's where all those private sector, state and local mail systems get their chance for a piece of the action. When it comes to mail between their customers and Federal Government parties, those other systems just dump it into the cloud and collect it from the cloud. As for individual agencies, just like the firms that have their own internal mail and messenger services and their own Mail Rooms, Federal agencies will operate their own internal e-mail systems. Just as organizations have systems for addressing internal paper mail, so agencies will be free to do as they wish for their internal e-mail. However, as their postal mail leaving the Mail Room must conform to USPS requirements, so their e-mail for outside parties must conform to the requirements of the M.U.S.E. Basic Principles of the M.U.S.E. Part IV of this report is a set of Operational Characteristics. All of those characteristics derive from the following five basic principles: 1. A single functional agency interface (for enveloping, transport and directory services) to everyone outside the agency. Using the postal analogy, a Mail Room is functionally the same, regardless whether it's in an agency's regional offices in Detroit, or its regional offices in San Diego, or its headquarters in Washington. One Mail Room dispatches any piece of postal mail to any party anywhere in the world. The functions deal with (1) noting for legal purposes the date and time of receipt and delivery, (2) protecting the mail from tampering, theft, or destruction, (3) making sure that the mail conforms to rules and regulations for its transport, and (4) providing for financial aspects of the mail handling. 2. No multi-agency, multi-interface burden on the private sector or on state and local governments. This principle is the other-end counterpart to the first principle. It means that parties outside the Federal Government are able to enjoy a single functional enveloping and transport interface to all of the Federal Government. A private sector firm must not be forced to use one system and/or discipline in order to send and receive e-mail with Federal Agency A, and a different system and/or discipline to do it with Federal Agency B, and so forth. This is absolutely essential to what is being called "one-stop shopping" for Federal Government services. As above, the functionalities deal with receipt and delivery, integrity and dependability of transport, financial arrangements, and an additional element - directory support. 3. A standard interface and discipline for interoperation with any non-Federal network, such that all private sector, state and local networks can provide an accommodation for their respective users or customers. If there were a national e-mail system, Federal Government parties could be expected to accommodate to it rather than vice versa. However, the reality is that there are potentially hundreds of unique e-mail systems outside the government which will want to offer government interoperation to their customers and users. Given the magnitude of the environment nationally, it cannot be in the best interest of the taxpayers for the government to be compelled to accommodate itself to the separate disciplines of those hundreds of systems. They should be required to accommodate to the published standard interface and discipline of the M.U.S.E. for enveloping and transport. Each state must be able to use its own state network, and each private sector firm must be free to use its own preferred carrier to get e-mail to and from all Federal Government agencies and offices. To avoid confusion about where along the chain of interoperating systems this applies, it should be clear that the standard enveloping and transport interface is between the M.U.S.E. and the systems that connect to it. The enveloping and transporting outside the M.U.S.E. is not the responsibility of, or controlled by, the M.U.S.E. 4. A directory arrangement that will support use by everyone outside the Federal Government, to support their dealings with the whole government; specifically, to find services, to find information, and to conduct business, regardless of which agency may be involved. Note that this does not prescribe anything for directories inside agencies to support their internal activities, nor does it require that names and addresses of individual employees be included. Using the postal and telephone systems as analogies, it says there will be one Federal Government equivalent to the postal ZIP code directory and street address directories, and one equivalent to the telephone blue and yellow pages. This doesn't prejudice the directory for or against any particular way of organizing, storing, accessing, or managing the contents. A directory arrangement might involve multiple individual directories, or it might be a single aggregation. It also implies some form of relationship with agency internal directories. 5. A solid foundation to support the regulatory needs of agencies and the needs and tests of the Federal Courts, for the conduct of Federal Government business and delivery of Federal Government services. Once again using the postal system as analogy, there must be the equivalent of the postmark to determine, legally, when something was mailed; of the return receipt to establish legally that something was delivered and when it was delivered; of the dependability of transport; of the preservation of item integrity; and of the address to which something required can be sent easily by all respondents regardless where the respondents may be located. These five principles underly all that is in the Part IV set of Operational Characteristics. The specifics that are shown in those characteristics are the consensus judgement of the developers of this report, after soliciting and reviewing many inputs and comments. (See Appendices 1, 2, and 3.) However, the five principles leave considerable latitude in the design and implementation of the operational M.U.S.E. THE BUSINESS CASE: CAPABILITIES AND BENEFITS To appreciate fully the business case for the M.U.S.E., it helps to have a perspective on e-mail that understands what sets it apart from its predecessors in its evolutionary tree, and its implications for the conduct of the business of government. What we now know as e-mail is the latest major evolutionary development in the chain that began with the telegraph. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the telegraph was created as a means to send simple messages great distances over wire, at close to the speed of light. Initially, both sender and receiver had to be connected on the same wire at the same time, and the message simply travelled once down the wire (with any attached party being able to obtain it), and then was gone. These dispatches came to be known as "messages," and the new world of electrical messaging was opened. Steady evolution led to the "teletype" machine, which replaced the single electrical signalling key with a typewriter-like keyboard. It also enabled messages to be punched into paper tape before they were sent over the wire (thereby permitting correction of operator miskeys), and allowed messages to be received into the paper tape (thereby preventing message loss if other parts of the machine weren't working or the machine was otherwise busy). Furthermore, messages could be sent to a specific machine through the introduction of machine "addressing." But it was the computer that brought about the first major evolutionary change. Enter: The Computer A quarter-century ago, the providers of "messaging" services and technologies realized that putting a computer into their telegraph systems created a quantum leap in capabilities. First, the computer could store messages both before and after they had been delivered. Storing before delivery meant that a message could be delivered at a prespecified time, or delivered at a time of day when the traffic volume was lower, thus enabling a lower rate to be charged. Second, the computer could make copies of messages and could store different lists of addresses, thus permitting a message to be entered once and then sent to a list of addressees, where all that the computer had been told was the name of the list. Third, the computer could perform actions upon the message by virtue of its ability to be programmed for those actions, for example, error checking, sender/receiver authorizations, and sophisticated accounting and billing. Fourth, the computer could receive messages over one signalling environment, and send them out over different signalling environments. Commercial messaging services that were built on the marriage of telegraphy and computers (often called "digital switches") soon found an important niche in the world of business and personal communications. Two recent developments led to the next major evolutionary change, from messaging to what we now know as electronic mail. The first was the marriage of computing and communications at the desktop, whereby electronic messages could be routed to a specific individual at that person's worksite. The second was the maturation of the concept known as "enveloping." By creating the electronic analog to the postal concept of the "envelope," the providers of messaging services and products were making it possible to send things electronically that, since the invention of writing, had been graven in stone or inscribed on papyrus, linen or paper. A business offer, an acceptance, a shipping notice, a delivery receipt, an invoice, even a payment, could all be enclosed in e-mail envelopes and sent electronically. Moreover, the digital revolution has made it possible to enclose even images and sounds in such envelopes. Ubiquity's Potentials Government delivers its services to individual citizens, most often via organizational entities. Those entities may be other governmental bodies, social service organizations, schools and colleges, financial institutions, or business enterprises such as insurance firms. Today, the desktop computer reachable via some communications network is ubiquitous in almost every organizational entity. By the end of this decade, every individual citizen will be reachable, if not via interactive television or some marriage of telephony and video cable, then via kiosks in shopping centers, or workstations or intelligent terminals in libraries, senior citizen centers, and recreation centers. When one views this relative to the postal mail system, it's clear that there is the potential to make every office, every public place, and probably every home, a "letter drop," as well as a place where "letters" can be received. Some Federal agencies have already taken advantage of the ubiquity for their interactions with organizational entities, such as insurance intermediaries, contractors, and research and development laboratories. This has been a most visible and encouraging tip of the service delivery iceberg. Where the $$$ Are The statement, Government Runs on Paper, is still substantially correct. The delivery of a benefit or service, like a business transaction, involves the exchange of declarations analogous to a business offer, acceptance, delivery, receipt, bill, and payment. When people or organizations "apply" to the government for any benefit or service, there begins an exchange that is governed and conditioned by law. The requirements of the law, and its implementing rules and regulations plus its procedures for guarding against, proving, and prosecuting fraud, lead to the "paperwork" and "red tape" with which everyone is so familiar. "Program administration" is the term often used for this environment and process. The paperwork required under law has two results. First, benefits and services cannot ordinarily be delivered until the paperwork has been completed. Second, the processing of the paperwork creates a cost that is borne by the taxpayers. A certain percentage of the total cost of every government program is the collection and processing of necessary information. While this percentage is usually low (less than five percent), if it were to aggregated across the entire Federal Government, it would probably total in the hundreds of millions of dollars every year. To be sure, program administration involves more than just handling forms, reports, notices, and payments. Clerks and benefits specialists in Federal agency offices across the country explain programs and benefits, answer unusual questions, and assist citizens, organizations, and local governments in their interactions with the Federal Government. While this will always be needed, a portion can be shifted to electronics, as the use of sophisticated computer-based voice response systems, together with "800" number calling have demonstrated. What remains to be tackled electronically is the collection and communication of the data that is required to trigger, maintain, and terminate a benefit or service. Federal Government agencies have almost entirely moved the "back room" processing from paper, typewriters and adding machines to computers. The "front-end" activities of collecting and communicating data are a gold-mine of costs savings waiting to be excavated. From the perspective of many citizens and organizations, the single most important aspect of "paperwork" is not the necessity to provide and process the data, or even the cost to taxpayers for that data handling. It is the time delays that can be involved. Much has been said about reducing government paperwork burdens, but if eligible beneficiaries were offered an additional item of paperwork in order to start receiving benefits four weeks earlier that usual, few would decline to fill it out. In general, people care about time delays in the government's processing as much or more than they care about the amount of data they must enter to get the desired benefit. Enter: The M.U.S.E. In the Summer of 1993, the developers of this report conducted a series of interviews in Federal agencies. (See Appendix 1 for the list of interviewees and their agencies.) What emerged was a clear and consistent picture of aspiration and need. All acknowledged several things: o A desire to automate the collection of data and as much of the interactions with clients as possible. "Automate" meant moving away from paper, and making it possible for any remaining paper to be processed with less clerical handling. The desire was based on both reducing administrative costs and providing more timely services. o That the telecommunications environment, or infrastructure, would be key to how soon this could happen, what forms it could take, and what it would cost. o That the telecommunications environment, or infrastructure, could open the door to significant enhancements of agency services, without necessarily incurring large incremental costs. o A need for the infrastructure to provide the legal protections against fraud, and support the rules and regulations involved in program administration. o That the lack of an existing communications infrastructure puts the full design and implementation burden on each agency -- a burden which only the most heavily funded and most highly visible agencies can obtain the resources to bear. The lack of a communications infrastructure means that agencies must allocate resources to the creation of the telecommunications portion of electronic service delivery, in addition to the data processing. Conversion of paper processes to electronic processes means changing some existing computer application software and procedures, and creating new application programs and procedures to deal with the new inputs and outputs. Agencies typically have just enough resources to maintain existing computer application processes and to keep up with changes to statutes and regulations, and client populations. Major process re-engineering typically involves front-end resource investment that has to pass muster as a line item in the budget. The lack of a supporting telecommunications infrastructure has three important effects. First, it requires each agency program to include infrastructure creation costs in their front- end program budgets, thereby making the initial hurdles that much higher. Second, it increases the aggregate costs to the taxpayers, because each agency is creating independently what needs to be created only once for all of them. Third, it leads to diversity and inconsistencies across agencies in their dealings with the American citizenry, state and local governments, and business enterprises. Electronic Commerce/Electronic Data Interchange Electronic commerce, often expressed as "EC," is a generic term covering a multitude of activities. This report takes it in its broadest possible sense, namely any and all electronic communications which carry legal implications, significance, or consequences, often but not necessarily of an economic nature. Electronic data interchange, expressed as "EDI," customarily means EC communications of sets of data that have predefined meaning and standardized arrangement. Thus, EDI people speak of "transaction sets," "data formats," and "transaction data elements." A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, and health care administration interactions with insurance companies, internal revenue service tax filings, SEC report filings, and VA procurement activities can all be seen as forms of EC, regardless of the data elements involved, their arrangements, and their degree of standardization. Another term in the EC lexicon is "trading partners." In the world of business and industry, trading partners are people who buy and sell goods and services to one another. In the world of government, trading partners are parties with whom agencies interchange money and information, as well as goods and services. Thus, we are all "trading partners" of the IRS. The concept of government "trading partners" and EC can be extended to forms of service relationships that don't involve money exchanges, or exchanges of goods and services. Government lawyers and their private bar counterparts are the "trading partners" of the Federal courts. Our agencies' General Counsels are "trading partners" of Justice Department attorneys. In this sense, EC can be taken to encompass all information needed to conduct "government business," which is another way of saying "mission activities." For the most part, however, this report tends to direct its statements about EC to the realm of economic transactions. On October 26, 1993, President Clinton signed a memorandum calling for the definition of an "architecture" for a "Government-wide electronic commerce acquisition system." Any such architecture has two major dimensions. One is the information content and expression; the other is the movement of the information from originator to receiver. The first is the province of the EC/EDI procurement professionals; the second is what this report defines on their behalf. This division between information content and expression, and information communication, is basic to the philosophy of the M.U.S.E., and applies equally to all aspects of Federal Government activities. Funding Possibilities The M.U.S.E. is an infrastructure which is potentially usable by every Federal Government entity in the delivery of its client services, and in the fulfillment of its missions. It needs to be built only once, although that building may extend over several years. It will require capital investment. Probably the most important thing to bear in mind about the M.U.S.E.'s creation is that it doesn't have to be built from the ground up. The foundation is already laid, and most of the building blocks have been formed. What we're talking about is incremental investment. The incremental investment needed to create the M.U.S.E. can, of course, be provided by a separate budget line item. If this approach is taken, there are two ways of handling the necessary offsets. One would be through the working capital funding approach, whereby the costs are recovered in subsequent time periods through user fees. Another would be to apply to the creation of the M.U.S.E. the portions of agency re-engineering project funds that would otherwise go to create separate, agency-unique telecommunications infrastructures. Yet a third approach is possible, which may or may not be politically viable. That approach would allow private industry or the USPS to provide the front-end capital investment, in exchange for the right to recover its investment - with a controlled rate of return - over some predetermined time period. The capital recovery would be through usage charges. As in the rest of the Government's communications environment, the two principal economic issues are mandatory use and charge-back fees. Because the nature of the M.U.S.E. capabilities and services - the Directory and the legal/regulatory support - are not likely to be readily available elsewhere, the mandatory use issue is not likely to be significant unless the usage charges are greatly out of line with the general marketplace. DESIGN AND IMPORTANCE OF THE DIRECTORY As noted above, the M.U.S.E. vision can be boiled down two just two simple dimensions: enveloping and transport, and the directory. Given the scope and size of the Federal Government and its activities, limiting the M.U.S.E.'s directory to a simple White Pages listing would be like building a Continental stretch limosine with a golf cart engine. If the M.U.S.E. is to deliver its full potential, its directory service must go far beyond a simple listing of people and their corresponding e-mail addresses. Such simple listing is called a "White Pages," to mirror its similarity to the equivalent listing in the telephone infrastructure. This awareness is hardly a new discovery. A decade earlier, international standards organizations anticipated the need for more than White Pages, and developed a directory specification that provides for rich functionalities exceeding even the combined White, Blue and Yellow pages of most telephone directories in the United States. To appreciate the functionalities that are both needed and possible, one should think less in terms if the simple listings of telephone directories, and more in terms of the data base capabilities associated with such established products known as "Data Base Management Systems." As the scenarios in Part III indicate, the first and foremost mission of the M.U.S.E. directory services is helping citizens and organizations identify appropriate receivers, when all that is known is some question about government benefits or services. "Blue Pages" Finding a party corresponding to a question about some subject was the original intent of what has become known in this country as the telephone "Blue Pages." In some telephone directories, the Blue Pages are an alphabetical listing of government agencies, but in others (particularly outside the Washington, D.C., area) they are an excellent subject-matter listing, wherein one entry may show several corresponding government agency numbers - Federal, state, and local - all together. Thus, a citizen seeking assistance regarding "children's immunizations" might find listings for the appropriate local, regional, state, and Federal agencies, all under a single subject- matter entry such as "children's health services." The M.U.S.E. directory can and should do no less than presenting to the public a consolidated subject-matter listing of Federal agency addresses, qualified by geographic location. Although this report does not envision specifically the inclusion in the M.U.S.E.'s Blue Pages of identifiers and addresses for state and local governmental agencies that fall under its subject-matter entries, that doesn't mean that such a combination is precluded in the future. "White Pages" The "right" or "best" approach to e-mail White Pages design is a subject of much controversy today. Unlike the Blue Pages which require consolidated listings under subject-matter headings, the White Pages can be handled in various ways. One approach to the White Pages is a single monolithic directory for everyone's address. Theoretically and technologically, this is feasible. Another approach calls for some segmentation of the White Pages into multiple cooperating directories, with no structural or even technological arrangement being required. This is also feasible. Yet a third approach calls for a "distributed" directory design according to some prescribed heirarchical and/or technological arrangement. The Operational Characteristics set forth in Part IV do not favor any particular approach, but allow for all. In reality, the Federal Government can expect to need a combination of all three. From the perspective of citizens and organizations outside the government, it will undoubtedly be necessary to provide a consolidated White Pages of elected Federal officials, and of those Presidentially-appointed officials whose office requires Senate approval. Whether more than these need to be included is open to debate. The assumption underlying the Operational Characteristics is that only the foregoing need to be incorporated into a consolidated White Pages, and that the remainder of White Pages listing can be in localized directories. Those directories are expected to exist within agencies, at whatever levels the agencies may choose. The international standards for e-mail directories envision a technological unity among cooperating directories. While ideal, this may not always be a realistic expectation. To accommodate the instances where interoperating e-mail environments have directories that can't cooperate automatically, there are at least three approaches to functional cooperation. One is the replication of one directory's contents into another directory. A second is the creation of a "Postmaster," to whom a directory inquiry can be sent; wherein the Postmaster is likely to be a human operator who reads and responds to the inquiry. A third is a process called "Query-by-Mail," which can be implemented either with or without human intervention. The Operational Characteristics allow for all four possible arrangements, and any additional arrangements that may be created. "Yellow Pages" The M.U.S.E.'s White Pages design is for the benefit of citizen and organization communication with elected and appointed officials, and the facilitation of e-mail across agency lines within the government. The Blue Pages design is for the removal of barriers to Federal Government services; to make the government less confusing and impenetrable to the Nation, and to speed the delivery of services by shortening the time to connect a citizen to an appropriate servicer. The Yellow Pages design is the mother lode in the gold mine, not only for individual agencies and individual non- Federal parties, but for the Nation as a whole. More hard dollar benefits may be associated with the Yellow Pages than with any other single feature of the M.U.S.E. While the Yellow Pages may be the most cost-beneficial part of the directory, its sophistication makes it the hardest to appreciate. In a nutshell, what the Yellow Pages do is facilitate not only the Federal Government's business with parties outside the government, but also those parties' business oportunities with the Federal Government. "Business" in this context is not just procurement, but any mission or program activity. Yellow Pages: Non-Procurement E-mail includes the concept of what is called "distribution list" addressing. A distribution list is a list of addressees which has a separate name for the entire list, taken as a whole. Someone who wishes to send the same message to everyone in the list need enter the message only once, addressed to the name of the list. The e-mail environment automatically sends the message to everyone in the list. The M.U.S.E. Yellow Pages let the Federal Government reap the full benefits of distribution list addressing by marrying it with the information-finding capabilities of the telephone Yellow Pages. For example, suppose the M.U.S.E. Yellow Pages contained an index heading for "Education - State and Local." Suppose further that under the sub-heading "Education - State," were these listings: the names, titles, and addresses of state Superintendents of Education (or the equivalent); the names, titles, and addresses of the chairpersons of the Education Committees of the state legislatures: the names, titles, and addresses of the Presidents of the state PTA organizations; the names, titles, and addresses of the Presidents of the state teachers' organizations. What the M.U.S.E. directory would be doing is making these lists available to all Federal agencies, for either list mailings or for finding appropriate individual parties in specific states. While the Department of Education might provide and maintain the listings in support of its departmental missions, the Labor Department could use it for communications with the teachers' unions, the Justice Department could use it for sending out bulletins related to drug abuse, the Defense Department could use it for sending out information about new training programs, the Housing Department could use it for sending out information about properties available for use to support education, the Interior Department could use it for sending out information about summer volunteer opportunities, the Agriculture Department could use it for matters about schoolchildren's nutrition, etc. In this one aspect alone, the M.U.S.E., with its Yellow Pages, could have a profound impact on the service delivery activities of the Federal Government. Yellow Pages: Procurement When one thinks of "electronic commerce," procurement activities are what usually come to mind. The is the classic use of the telephone Yellow Pages: finding a seller for a product being sought by a buyer. As the Part III scenarios indicate, the M.U.S.E. Yellow Pages can accomplish much more than this. Once again, the distribution list capability is a key ingredient. The other key ingredient is the rich data base manipulation and retrieval capability. When the two are combined, it becomes possible to set up lists of government suppliers and contractors, by kind of product or service, with each party listed being marked according to any special procurement programs or categories into which the party falls or for which it is qualified. The directory's data base retrieval capabilities will support finding entries that meet some set of user-specified search criteria, chosen from a menu of possible searches. For example, the M.U.S.E. Yellow Pages might contain, for each major city, a list of qualified sources of office copiers, supplies and service. Each might be noted as to the manufacturer lines handled, the limits of its service area, and whether it falls into special procurement categories according to size or ownership. One can begin to see how this can lead to creating bidder lists for Federal procurements, at least of the small purchase type. A substantial portion of the government's procurement outlays are for what are known as small purchases. There is a powerful incentive for both buyer and seller to move this area of procurement away from paper and into electronics. From the government's perspective, electronics can lead to lower costs for the items purchased, faster delivery, and a reduction of the ratio of procurement overhead to actual dollars spent. From the suppliers' perspective, electronics can lead to increased opportunities for bidding, faster stock turn, faster cash flow, and reduced selling expense. If ever there was a win-win opportunity, this is it. What's needed to make it happen is the M.U.S.E., together with its Yellow Pages. The first is the infrastructure to support the electronic flow of bid request, price quotation, order, acknowledgement, delivery receipt, invoice, and payment. The second is the means by which procurement offices in different Federal agencies can share lists of qualified suppliers, and send out bid requests, e.g., to thirteen parties instead of three. "Green Pages" This name was coined to identify a functionality so closely related to the Blue Pages that it might almost be wedded to that part of the directory. Just as the Blue Pages help people find sources of Federal assistance, the Green Pages help people find sources of Federal information publications and holdings. If the M.U.S.E. directory is going to help people find Federal offices according to their mission/program activities, why should those people have to go somewhere else to find Federal information? By such information we mean publications, data compilations, and other prepared items of information or data that are available to the public. Almost everyone who has been exposed to the educational process in the United States has learned to use a library catalog. In it, the library holdings are listed three different ways: by author, by title, and by subject. The catalog is a simple listing that almost everyone can understand and use. It is an obvious model for the Green Pages, because it can be used directly by anyone with an eighth-grade education, without needing an intermediary such as a professional librarian. As this report is being written, efforts are underway in the Federal Government to move towards sophisticated information locators. Such locators take full advantage of the power of today's computer systems, and the standards that have evolved in the information storage and retrieval community for information searching. However, the richer and more sophisticated the functionalities, the more a trained, experienced searcher is needed as an intermediary for the occasional or unsophisticated information seeker. As these powerful locators are built, the data needed for the M.U.S.E.'s Green Pages can be extracted from them. Non-Federal Directory Interactions Virtually all e-mail systems have directories. The M.U.S.E. will be connecting with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of e-mail systems, both Federal and non- Federal. It must have some form of directory interaction with the Federal systems, as discussed above and in the Operational Characteristics. But what interactions should it have with the non-Federal systems for purpose of acquiring non-Federal addresses? This report is deliberately silent about the M.U.S.E.'s ability to interact with the directories of non-Federal systems for the purpose of Federal acquisition of non- Federal addresses. This report's focus is on providing Federal addresses to both Federal and non-Federal parties. Given the directory capabilities of such systems as the Internet, Prodigy, CompuServe, MCI-Mail, other commercial services, and such state e-mail systems as Minnesota's, it is most desirable that Federal parties who are using the M.U.S.E. to communicate with parties on those other systems be able to use those systems' directory services to aid the communications. This carries legal and contractual implications as well as technical considerations, and the M.U.S.E. report authors decided simply to acknowledge the possibilities. POSSIBLE IMPLEMENTATION STRATEGIES Because the Federal Government is massive, the M.U.S.E. is massive (at least when compared with any single agency's e-mail system). What makes it so is the geographic spread of the government, its dealings with almost every part of every state and local government, and its interactions with almost every private sector enterprise; not to mention the interactions via the M.U.S.E. with millions of individual people by the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Social Security Administration, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The M.U.S.E. contemplates interacting with hundreds of thousands of organizations and millions of individuals via kiosks, office workstations, school and library computers, and interactive television. It contemplates a directory to all Federal Government benefit and service assistance, to Federal Government information sources and holdings, and to Federal Government business partnerships, all qualified by geographic location. How does one go about creating something so extensive? The answer lies, in part, in looking at what both the government and private sector of the United States have managed to create in the past. Two examples that come to mind are the private sector's telephone directory services, and the Federal Government's FTS2000 system. Both are much larger than the M.U.S.E. This report doesn't recommend one strategy over another, but recognizes that several alternative approaches may be possible. Regardless the approach chosen, the M.U.S.E. won't all be built at once, overnight. Departmental Approach One Department, such as Health and Human Services, could be a starting point. Under this approach, the separate component bureaus, services, agencies, divisions, etc., would be brought into the M.U.S.E. and its directory, one or two at a time. In the process, the enveloping and transport interface standards would be developed, the security mechanisms refined, and the directory populated and explored. Geographic Approach One metropolitan area, other than Washington, D.C., could be a starting point. Under this approach, the resident Federal offices would be brought into the M.U.S.E. and its directory, one or two at a time. As above, the standards and mechanisms would be explored and refined in the process. Functional Approach One specific functional area, such as trade, or health care, or food and nutrition, could be a starting point. Under this approach, selected agency programs in different Federal departments would be brought into the M.U.S.E. and its directory, one or two at a time. Again, standards and mechanisms would be explored and refined in the process. The recent signing of the Presidential memorandum on electronic commerce makes this functionality an obvious candidate for initial M.U.S.E. implementation. Combination Approach Two or more of the foregoing could be pursued in parallel, with an over-all coordination function managing and harmonizing them. For example, health care activities in HHS could be brought into the M.U.S.E. in parallel with the development of a government-wide electronic procurement system. Global Approach The global approach would mean preparing a full set of specifications up front, and issuing them as a consolidated procurement package. It would be a multi- year, government-wide contract for the full development and operation of the M.U.S.E., even though the actual construction would occur in stages, or phases. The advantage of the global approach is that everyone has a very good idea at the beginning what the final result will be and when it will be available. The disadvantage is that when one is building something that has never been built before, unforeseen events and developments can pose great difficulties. Building the M.U.S.E. will be a learning experience, and its builders must expect to have to make adjustments as they proceed. Regardless the approach chosen, the Federal Government needs to see that our American society is plunging headlong into the world of electronic information flows, and that an insular, each-agency-for-itself approach will be detrimental to the Nation. The M.U.S.E. is the obvious vision for positioning the government rationally to take maximum advantage of what is happening in the country as a whole. The M.U.S.E. will not meet every need, such as for interactive transaction processing and information content browsing, but it will clearly give the government an electronic counterpart to postal mail and courier services for the conduct of not just procurement transactions, but all regular agency business. The sooner the government starts to create it, the sooner the Nation will reap its benefits. Appendix 1 In the Summer of 1993, the Working Group conducted a series of structured interviews of selected executives, managers and senior professionals in several Executive Branch organizations. The interviews were arranged under the auspices of the Federal IRM Policy Council. Each interview included a set of pre-arranged questions, with the same questions being posed to all interviewees, to provide comparability of findings. Those findings are reflected in the report. Department/Agency: Interviewees Department of Commerce: Reed Phillips, Ron Hack, Teresa Carroll Department of Education: Cary Greene DHHS/Health Care Finance Administration: Eva Jun Department of Housing & Urban Development: Darlene Schoonfield, Edie Pembleton, Jon Marshall Department of the Interior: Gayle Gordon, John Jones Department of Labor: John Dineen, Greg Story Small Business Administration: Joe Maas, Randy Balloun, Lori Renner, Frank Chow Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA): Robert Woods DVA/Veterans Benefits Administration: Rhoda Mancher Department of the Treasury: Steve Bryant Treasury/Customs Service: Bernadette Currie Treasury/Internal Revenue Service: Ray LeFrancois Appendix 2 This Appendix lists the many people and groups with whom the Working Group interacted in some way in support of its efforts during the period October 1992 through October 1993. Some gave informal assistance at their group meetings, some were visited at their places of work, some made presentations to the Working Group, and some assisted by reviewing preliminary draft report materials. This report reflects each of their inputs in one way or another. Those inputs have been much appreciated. Organization: Individual Bell Communications Research (Bellcore): William J. Barr CompuServe Corporation: David F. Link Control Data Systems, Incorporated: Robert A. Johnson Department of Defense, DISA, Defense Messaging System: Thomas W. Clarke, Lt.Col. Phil Poler, Monte Welch Department of Defense, DLA, EC/EDI Program Management Office: Bob Harrison, Arthur Hutchinson Department of Defense, Undersecretary, Acquisition: Jack Bartley Department of Justice, General Counsel, JMD: Scott Goldsmith Du Pont Corporation: Anthony E. Thomas, Kenneth Hutcheson General Services Administration: George Lovelace, Al Williams General Services Administration, FTS2000: Jack Torbert Government Information Locator Service Working Group: Eliot Christian, Chair Integrated Services Panel: David Bittenbender, Chair Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory: Judith E. Payne, Robert E. Frank League of Women Voters, New York State: Ruth Goldstein Mitre Corporation: David C. Hartmann Montefiore Medical Center, New York: Dr. Mervyn Goldstein NASA Headquarters: Larry Shomo National Institute of Standards & Technology, CSL: Steve Trus, Dennis D. Steinauer, Robert Rosenthal, Michael Ransom, Stuart W. Katzke, Jerry Linn Network Solutions, Incorporated: Scott Williamson Northern Telecom Corporation: David R. McCormick, Paul Shepherd, Gordon Preston Office of Management & Budget, OIRA: Maya A. Bernstein, Jonas Neihardt, Peter Weiss PRC, Incorporated: Russell Davis Prodigy Services Corporation: Sandy Weiss Resource Sharing Panel: Frank Lalley, Chair Securities and Exchange Commission: David Copenhafer, Bill McDonald Social Security Administration: Martin Baer, Jan Hoffman The GOSIP Institute: Richard desJardins Unified Communications, Incorporated: Craig M. Johnson Appendix 3 This Appendix lists the people who were kind enough to take time to put comments in writing in response to the Working Group's Preliminary Report, which was issued in April, 1993. All comments were reviewed, and special thanks are extended to everyone. Organization: Individual CompuServe Corporation: Maurice A. Cox, President & CEO Boeing Computer Support Services: Jim Estes Dept. of Defense, Office of Assistant Secretary for C3I: D. Diane Fountaine Department of Health & Human Services: Norman Oslik, Maureen Williams Department of Veterans Affairs: Robert J. Woods Department of Veterans Affairs, VBA: Sandra Whittington, Bob Meisel Environmental Protection Administration: Donald W. Fulford General Services Administration: Don Hardesty, Michael L. Corrigan Health Care Financing Administration, Dept. of HHS: Eva T. Jun NASA Ames Research Center: Douglas B. Pearson NASA Headquarters: Dr. Linwood P. Randolph, Anthony J. Villasenor NASA Marshall Space Flight Center: J. Alan Forney, John C. Lynn, Mike Savage National Security Agency: Greg Bergren Office of Personnel Management: William C. Duffy Part II: QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS FOR AGENCY PERSONNEL What's so significant about this M.U.S.E. proposal? It looks ahead into the expanding world of electronic communications, towards which our Federal agencies are all either going now or are committed to go in the next few years. It doesn't look ahead very far, just to the end of this decade, about six years from now. It will be here before we know it, and what we do now can make a difference between order and chaos, harmony and discord. The reports of the National Performance Review and the other thrusts of the new administration are almost certain to accelerate our agencies' push towards re-engineering their business processes. That means more data reports being submitted electronically, more business being conducted electronically, and more information being disseminated electronically. The M.U.S.E. can be a key element in all this by providing an enabling infrastructure. Nothing now on the horizon can contribute as much to business process re-engineering throughout the Government as can the M.U.S.E. Will this M.U.S.E. replace my agency's e-mail system(s)? No way! A major dimension of e-mail systems within agencies is going to be for work-flow support, business process re-engineering, re-inventing government, new paradigms, etc. You can bet that your agency's systems will have aspects that will make them different from other agency systems. As we look into the future, we see the differences centering on such things as use of forms, integration of voice annotation and messaging, incorporation of scanned images, support for multiple languages (e.g., Spanish in addition to English), etc. Also, agencies can have different records management dimensions. The richness of information expression and use will lead to greater diversity, not less. If that's the case, how will the M.U.S.E. help my agency? The M.U.S.E. will bring a measure of order to your agency's communications with the outside world. The M.U.S.E. will provide a single interface that has a very great degree of richness. The Directory alone will provide benefits to both your agency and the American public far beyond what your agency can do on its own. The Yellow Pages will give your agency faster and less expensive procurement, especially in small purchases; the Blue Pages will help the parties to whom your agency delivers services find what they're supposed to find; the Blue Pages also will help you and your colleagues find what you want to find in other agencies; and the Green Pages will help both you and non-Federal parties find government information. The M.U.S.E. will also relieve you of many of the legal problems that will accompany the move from paper to electronics. Isn't interpersonal messaging the heart and soul of e- mail? Why not leave the other stuff like electronic commerce for the future and just focus on interpersonal messaging? Beware the trap of defining what your agency requires to do its missions in terms of what you need to do yours. Within an agency, interpersonal messaging predominates. Internal agency e-mail systems will probably always focus primarily on interpersonal messaging. Outside your agency, the information flows are predominantly formal. Envelopes convey letters, forms, and notices that have legal significance. The M.U.S.E. is focused on giving your agency the solid interface with the outside world that will meet your agency's needs for data collection, regulatory infrastructure support, benefit notifications and other client service outputs, plus procurement activities. By leaving your agency's internal environment up to you, the M.U.S.E. provides for the cultural and other differences among Federal agencies. So then, how will the M.U.S.E. impact my agency's systems? One needs to think in terms of two types or families of agency systems: e-mail systems, and what are popularly called "applications." The latter are the systems that process the data and crank out the checks, massage the reports, analyze the numbers, send out the notices, and in general, do the back-room work that supports your agency's field office specialists all across the U.S. Your agency's e-mail systems will interface to the M.U.S.E. in accordance to published specifications. That may mean some form of gateway, or it could turn out to be a common native-mode connection. Your agency's applications that are receiving inputs on paper will have to be modified to receive inputs electronically, in e-mail envelopes. That will take longer and cost more than just interfacing the e-mail systems. But at least the applications won't have to contend with the communication mechanics of how to receive their data inputs and send out their information products. Would we and all other Federal agencies and their clients be forced to use the M.U.S.E.? That's not recommended in the M.U.S.E. report. The mandatory - non-mandatory question may never arise. There's not likely to be any substitute for the M.U.S.E.'s Directory. Furthermore, the transport services specified for the M.U.S.E. in the Operational Characteristics are very powerful -- designed specifically to meet high performance and reliability standards for Federal service delivery. Agencies will want to use the M.U.S.E. for what it offers. What time frame are we talking about, and can the technology support it? The M.U.S.E. report developers have already spent a year working out the major dimensions, and have held talks with many parties in industry. They are convinced that if implementation were to commence in 1994, all of the functionality could be in place by 1998 or 1999. But the Government and the Nation wouldn't have to wait until then to be reaping benefits. The benefits could be flowing as soon as 1996. As to technology, most of what's needed exists today in released or soon-to-be-released products and services. The balance can be provided by modifying or expanding those products and services. My agency has plans underway to implement new systems with electronic inputs, for which we're building our own communications environments. How will we relate to the M.U.S.E.? Let's be clear up front that agency projects can't be put on hold while the government's central management authorities are getting their act together. Agencies must do the best they can under the prevailing circumstances. If an agency implements a major new application with electronic inputs and outputs, instead of paper, it must do the best it can with what's available. As the M.U.S.E. becomes available, such systems will undoubtedly look to see if its use will be advantageous. If so, they'll make the modifications necessary to get the M.U.S.E.'s benefits. Does the M.U.S.E. mean a single system between my agency and the outside world? Not necessarily. But look at it this way: Virtually all the long-distance telephone carriers as well as all the regional Bell operating companies already offer or soon will be offering e-mail services, in competition with such value-added services as CompuServe, America On-Line, Prodigy, and others. Everyone is getting into the market either themselves or in some form of partnership. Supposing - for discussion only - that General Motors were to use AT&T for its interoperations with parties outside the corporation, Ford were to use Sprint, Chrysler were to use MCI, Eastman Kodak were to use WilTel, IBM were to use its own network, DuPont were to use GEISCO, etc. Given this reality of the 1990's, how are you going to connect with all of them for your agency's mission and business needs, including the reporting of data required by your agency's regulations? The list above focused just on commercial systems. Now add in all the state systems being built to provide the e- mail support to the governmental entities in their respective states with which your agency must deal. Are you going to maintain connections to all the state systems in addition to all the commercial carriers in the United States? The Social Security Administration might be big enough to do it, but how about your agency? Why should every Federal agency have to implement its own interoperation with every state and commercial system in order to provide equal access to its clients? That makes sense, but could we split the middle-man business between a few chosen providers? Perhaps. The big issue is Directory support. Theoretically, there could be two or more middle-men between agency systems and private-sector/state-local systems. But if that's the case, how will the Directory work? If you were charged with providing a consolidated Blue Pages for the Federal Government, and a consolidated Yellow Pages to support the small purchase activities of multiple agencies in different Departments, and if you were accountable for accuracy, reliability, consistency and performance, might you be wary of multiple middle-men between the agencies and the outside world? Partitioning and replication techniques exist, but their benefits come with costs. My agency wants to migrate paper applications and filings to electronic submission, in order to process benefits and services faster, with less manual handling. Many of these activities involve date/time aspects which have to be spelled out in official legal rules and regulations. My agency wants to avoid lawsuits, and also be confident that its rules and regulations will be enforceable in court. I must provide an electronic environment equivalent for legal support/enforcement purposes to the environment provided for paper by the U.S. Postal Service. Does the M.U.S.E. address this? That's exactly what the M.U.S.E. addresses, because it characterizes so many of the government's programs. In addition to the security aspects of authentication, verification, and non-repudiation, the M.U.S.E. report developers have put forward their best understanding of what the business and regulatory parts of their agencies feel will be needed to avoid lawsuits against the Government, and also to support the Government's rules and regulations in court. Individual citizens as well as private sector organizations must have a clear expectation of delivery within a specified period of time, and they must have proof of that delivery. While it is unusual for there to be a legal requirement of delivery to a specific named individual within an agency, it is commonplace for there to be a need for delivery to some specified agency location, easily accessible, which can acknowledge the delivery. The M.U.S.E. provides for delivery to an agency point of entry, with return acknowledgement to the sender. The agency regulations may then be written to require delivery to that point of entry. This will meet the legal needs of both your agency and the parties on whom it levies regulations and with whom it does business. All that you will have to do within your own agency is be sure that your interconnection to the M.U.S.E. is open (with an alternate entry point if you need it), and that your message store capacity is big enough to hold what you're expecting. How you distribute the workload that piled up after yesterday's close of business is your agency's concern, not the M.U.S.E.'s. There's a lot of interest in making my agency's information holdings, press releases, and informational bulletins available electronically. How does the M.U.S.E. relate to that? It relates in several ways. First, the M.U.S.E. provides a wonderful means of rapid dissemination of important information to parties throughout the nation. That means - distribution list addressing - will help the Food and Drug Administration and the Center for Disease Control distribute bulletins to state health departments, the National Institutes of Health to hospitals, the Labor Department to state employment agencies, the Department of Housing and Urban Development to state and local housing authorities, etc. Second, the M.U.S.E. will have a directory that helps searchers find not only Federal offices and their functions, but also Federal information. We're all familiar with the telephone Blue Pages, which list governmental offices. The M.U.S.E.'s directory will show not only the offices, but their principal functions. It can show the relationships between the offices and the agency missions, and also between the offices. It's quite sophisticated, but that's what technology can do for the Blue Pages and the people who use them. If we're going to do that for the Blue Pages, why should businesses, organizations, researchers, and ordinary citizens have to go elsewhere for a similar means of finding the public information that those Federal offices, libraries, laboratories, etc., produce or store? If we can have a directory to locate offices and functions, we can use that directory to help everyone locate information holdings. The M.U.S.E. report calls this the "Green Pages." How does the M.U.S.E. relate to the National Information Infrastructure (NII), and the data superhighways I keep hearing about? The M.U.S.E. is a logical environment, not a physical one. Just as Postal Service trucks need interstate highways, and Federal Express airplanes need air navigation routes, so the M.U.S.E. will need circuits, switches, etc. The M.U.S.E. traffic can ride over data superhighways, or over more modest expressways, whichever is available and not already congested. As to the NII, the M.U.S.E. with its Directory, more than any other single endeavor, will facilitate the many-to-many relationship between the thousands of Federal functions, offices and information holdings, regardless of location; and the tens of millions of people, worksites, organizations, etc., throughout the Nation. What about privacy and security? Privacy and security is not unique to the world of electronics. The basic principles and requirements are rooted in law, and law will be where future principles and requirements are defined. The challenge faced by us all is to take the existing law and apply it to our new electronic environments. Where the law is silent or ambiguous, we give it our best shot and hope that when the matter gets to court we'll come out okay. That's what the M.U.S.E. will have to do, also. Clearly, there will need to be a lot of collaboration in design and implementation among the many experts in our agencies and in such supporting organizations as the National Institute for Standards and Technology. Together, we can and will accomplish what the lawmakers and courts require. Aren't we talking about big bucks, and where's it going to come from? There are two aspects here. One is initial construction; the other is operation. Infrastructures cost money. That money is called capital investment. It yields returns. The returns are called profits. The taxpayers are entitled to reap the profits of wise infrastructure investments by their Government. The National Performance Review pointed to the potential profits. Now it's time to address the capital investment to produce the profits. We think it should come by appropriation, but other approaches may be possible. One may be a working-capital fund approach. Another may be to require the agencies that will be the heaviest users of the M.U.S.E. to ante up some funds from their agency budgets, which will be pooled into the M.U.S.E. infrastructure investment. A third approach which must be considered is to ask industry to provide some or all of the up-front investment money, and to give it, in return, the right to collect user fees. That would be like the arrangement with concessionnaires in the National Parks. As to operation, the key questions are direct appropriation versus some form of agency charge-back, and fees to non-Federal users. There is no doubt in the minds of the M.U.S.E. report authors that the bulk of the traffic that flows through the M.U.S.E. will originate outside the Federal Government. Think of what is likely in 1998, if not earlier: Tax returns filed electronically not only from H&R Block offices, but also from computers in public libraries, schools, other public places, and perhaps also homes, connected to municipal networks which are connected to their state's network, e.g., those built or under construction in New York, Iowa, California, Minnesota, and elsewhere. Many if not most of the reports required by Federal regulation being requested electronically, perhaps even REQUIRED electronically, as the Securities and Exchange Commission is doing. Health care interactions with insurers, alliances, state governmental bodies, hospitals, and others, being either required electronically, or being penalized economically for not being electronic. (This is already happening in the country.) Major cable systems throughout the country having deployed interactive services, and just waiting for the opportunity to interoperate with governmental agencies; for example to display visual information about recreational facilities operated by the National Park Service and the Forest Service, and to book reservations. The list could go on and on, including in your own Department or agency. Who will foot the bill for the traffic with state and local governments, with insurers, with government suppliers, with private citizens, etc.? How about if the electronic communications are mandatory versus optional? How about when a private sector firm sends 20,000 messages to Federal IRM and other professionals in cities all across the country inviting you and your compatriots to attend a major new product announcement held simultaneously in multiple cities? Could bulk mailing charges help pay for the M.U.S.E.? They help pay for the Postal Service, so why not also the M.U.S.E.? Are we looking at yet another bureaucracy here? With luck, no. Realistically, however, the M.U.S.E. involves responsibilities for design, management and operations, especially for the Directory and its services. If the funding picture involves charge-back, there will be a need for accounting and billing and auditing. Many of these functions can be contracted, but the government will still be left with the core necessity of contract administration. I thought FTS2000 provided e-mail services. Why not just use those services? The M.U.S.E. report developers have concentrated on the functionalities needed, not the source of or contracting for those functionalities. Some of the functionalities are available to agencies today; most are not. Those that are not, need to be implemented. The M.U.S.E. report developers take no position with respect to where or how the functionalities get implemented, but trust that management officials will cooperate to find the money and get the job done. We all need it. The Nation needs it. Part III: SOME SCENARIOS: Small Business Senior Citizens White Collar Workers Kiosks, and One-Stop Shopping College Students Schools, and Human Services Large Corporations M.U.S.E. Scenario -- SMALL BUSINESS: Co-op Gets Gov't Orders Quickly; Credit Goes to New Communications Charles Small, the Managing Director of the new co-op dairy wholesaler in Middletown, wanted to sell the co-op's locally-produced items to the nearby VA Hospital, Federal Prison, and Army base. He had a good product line-up, and believed he could compete with the two big regional suppliers who now divide all the business between them. Mr. Small elected to use MCI Mail for his computer ordering from the two national firms he uses to fill out his product line-up. Since MCI Mail is connected to the Federal Government's electronic Mail Users' Support Environment (M.U.S.E.), and has the M.U.S.E.'s Blue Pages in its network, he used it first to contact the Small Business Administration to request the latest pamphlets on financing, and the Agriculture Department for the latest materials on organic milk products. From the Green Pages, he learned about those agencies' bulletin board systems for information dissemination. Mr. Small also got from the Blue Pages the address for the Procurement Office at each of the nearby Federal installations. He sent each of them his message describing the new business, stating that a product list was being mailed, offering to provide emergency, locally-based delivery services, and demonstrating his ability to interact electronically. Soon Mr. Small got a message from each of the installations stating that his bank and business references had been checked and that he was being added to the qualified bidders list for dairy products bought by those facilities. He was also sent, via the M.U.S.E.'s connection with MCI Mail, the standard four-page set of instructions of how the VA Hospital conducts its ordering, delivery confirmation, and payment. The Army base's instructions were a bit longer, and the Prison's instructions were received via fax. To verify his inclusion as a qualified Federal Government supplier, Mr. Small used his MCI Mail connection to browse the M.U.S.E.'s Yellow Pages listings of Federal Government contractors and suppliers, which MCI Mail makes available to its subscribers. When the local installations had accepted his request for inclusion, the VA Hospital was the first to post his information into the M.U.S.E.'s Yellow Pages. Charles saw that he appeared under Wholesalers - Dairy, and that the entry was complete and accurate, except for his postal address. Accordingly, he sent a message to the Hospital requesting the address correction. He also verified that his listing could be found by an alphabetical request (like the White Pages), because the international directory standard used in the M.U.S.E. and supported also by MCI Mail, permits him to search both ways. Several months later, when the co-op's business had grown, Mr. Small decided to try to sell to facilities in a wider area by extending his radius 60 miles. To learn what prospects there might be, Mr. Small checked the Federal Government's Small Purchases Bid Invitation listing. That listing is maintained in the M.U.S.E., and is the electronic counterpart of the old printed Commerce Business Daily. When Charles saw that the Agriculture Research station was seeking a supplier of organic cheeses for longevity testing, he immediately sent them his bid. Because the M.U.S.E. enables Federal agencies to conduct electronic commerce using either the Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) formats, or formatted, fill-in-the- blanks forms, or even straight text, Mr. Small finds that he rarely has to deal with paper with his Federal Government customers, just as with the national lodging chains whose local hotels he supplies. M.U.S.E. Scenario -- SENIOR CITIZENS: Social Security Paperwork a Pain? Feds Come Up With Quick Relief Widow Finds Missing Check Electronically Congress Benefits Big, Too! Mrs. Margaret Voles, a widow in her late 60s, decided to relocate to a warmer climate. She found a very attractive, and affordable, retirement community in Sunnystate, where she recently visited in order to sign all the financial and property papers. The community, called Vitaltown, has arranged with the local high school for upperclass volunteers to come there daily to operate the three personal computers in support of the residents. They're located in the same building with the cafeteria and game room, and are connected to both Prodigy and CompuServe. Several of the residents use them to check news and financial listings, arrange for travel, and exchange messages with their grandchildren at college. Mrs. Voles never had used a computer, and felt a degree of anxiety about them. When the Vitaltown manager suggested that she ask the volunteer to help her send the change of address notification to the Social Security Administration (SSA), she was quite skeptical. Still, she decided to try it because she finds the process of paperwork to be stressful, and this other way of doing it couldn't be that much worse. The volunteer explained what CompuServe is, and told her that it had a connection to the Federal Government's electronic Mail Users' Support Environment (M.U.S.E.), to which the SSA is also connected. The volunteer had no difficulty in using the SSA's fill-in-the-blanks approach for entering and sending the change of address. Mrs. Voles was amazed at how simple it seemed to be. The SSA, desiring to both reduce administrative costs and provide electronic services, had wrestled with the challenge of providing these services with strong protections against criminal actions by persons seeking to use the electronic environment for nefarious purposes. They managed to devise an approach that was both simple yet effective, and which has since become a model for other entitlement programs. Two major benefits are gained by this change-of- address process. First, the whole business is done by computer. The data is entered by filling in blanks in an electronic form, which the SSA's computer can handle directly. Second, the electronic approach results in almost instantaneous data entry. In June, when Mrs. Voles moved to Sunnystate, her Social Security check didn't arrive at Vitaltown. This had happened to her almost two years ago when she first entered the payment system, and she remembered the difficulty of trying to straighten it out by telephone. She had heard that the SSA gets about a million such calls every month, so this time she first asked the computer volunteer what might have gone wrong. The volunteer immediately sent an inquiry message to the SSA to learn whether the check was sent, and to what address. The SSA had established a standard form for that common inquiry, (also with appropriate protections) so that it, too, could be entered directly into its computer system without operator intervention. The volunteer had learned about that particular processing, because the SSA had prepared an instruction notice which was available to anyone via the M.U.S.E. Within the hour, the volunteer at Vitaltown received a computer-generated message that the check had been sent to Mrs. Voles' previous address. Further investigation revealed that the original change of address notification had indicated a move at the end of June, instead of the end of May. July's check arrived on time at the Vitaltown address. Meanwhile, Mrs. Voles was amazed to see so many Vitaltown residents using CompuServe's connection to the M.U.S.E. to express their thoughts to Congress and the White House. She discovered that a letter could be entered once, and addressed to both Senators, the district's Representative, and the White House. Of course, CompuServe charges a small amount for this service, but it is cheaper and easier than four long- distance telephone calls, and there is no busy signal to contend with. Because the M.U.S.E. delivers the messages within a half-hour, it is virtually as effective as a voice call. Legislators now encourage this mode of communication because it lets them process lots of messages quickly and inexpensively. Most important, it facilitates replies more readily than with postal mail communication. A staff assistant scans the incoming messages and electronically selects an appropriate prestored reply for each, which is then return-mailed automatically. If desired, the sending of the reply can be timed for some interval after the sending of the incoming message. If a message to a legislator needs to be referred to an Executive Branch agency, the Congress's participation in the M.U.S.E. enables the referral to be done electronically. At the same time, a follow-up alert is recorded by the legislator's computer, for whatever response date has been requested. Additionally, Vitaltown's Representative had recently built an electronic mail address list to use for citizen polling. The House of Representatives had decided that its members could use the M.U.S.E. for such broadcast messaging. M.U.S.E. Scenario -- WHITE COLLAR WORKERS: Lawyers, Judges Gain from New Communication Links Electronic Filing Now in Sight Local Businessman Also Benefits Stuart and Mary Bolt consider themselves lucky. Stuart weathered the recession, keeping his job as purchasing manager at the auto parts manufacturer in Central City. Last month, Mary, an environmental lawyer, helped land an important new client for the business- practice law firm in which she had just made partner. Like so many of their friends, the Bolts find information technology to be an integral part of their lives. Both have personal computer workstations by their desks, and fax machines in their offices. Stuart's company has a voice-mail system, and he has a cellular phone in his car, while Mary recently bought a "personal communicator" which is a combination of portable telephone and notebook computer. They have a high-end personal computer at home, with a CD/ROM unit, a modem, and a subscription to CompuServe. Mary can dial into her firm's local area network, and Stuart can dial into his company's host computer. Mary shares the enthusiasm of lawyers throughout the country over the Federal Government's implementation of its Mail Users Support Environment (M.U.S.E.), and in particular, the way the Courts have chosen to take advan- tage of it. As part of the docketing procedures, the electronic mail addresses of the attorneys are recorded, along with postal mail addresses and voice and fax tele- phone numbers. Judges, from their chambers, send messages concerning scheduling which are group-addressed for simultaneous transmission to all attorneys in a given case. They can also send out orders the same way. The M.U.S.E. lets them get a positive date-time stamp back for each party's receipt of the message or order. Judges' secretaries spend less time on the telephone and fax machine, and can distribute messages and orders much more quickly and easily; and attorneys find themselves making fewer unpro- ductive trips to the courthouse. Mary and her fellow attorneys appreciate also the use of the M.U.S.E. to coordinate on simple procedural matters. Although substantive pleadings must still be filed in multiple paper copies, some Districts are experimenting with M.U.S.E.-transmitted minor procedural actions. Mary also uses the M.U.S.E.'s Green Pages to help her find and get environmental regulatory and statistical information from Federal agencies such as the E.P.A. Data is now being "published" on CD/ROM disks, and offered for sale by the Government Printing Office (GPO) and the National Technical Information Service (NTIS). Both accept credit-card orders via the M.U.S.E., in just the same way that entertainment services make non-refundable credit-card ticket sales on voice telephone calls. Stuart has also become a M.U.S.E. user in several ways. As the family's outdoorsman and vacation-planner, he appreciates the ability to make campsite reservations in national parks and forests via the M.U.S.E., as well as request maps and publications from these and other Federal agencies. He was delighted at being able to use the M.U.S.E. to request IRS publications, but even more delighted when he found he could send a specific tax inquiry through it. That way, he had a written record of both his question and the IRS's answer. Recently, Stuart used his office's M.U.S.E. connection to get passport information, and to make some inquiries of the Commerce Department, both in connection with his forthcoming business trip to several Asian countries. Last month, he had been able to use the M.U.S.E. to locate and obtain information from the Transportation Department, to help his staff in evaluating a major truck procurement. M.U.S.E. Scenario -- KIOSKS, and ONE-STOP SHOPPING: Gov't Using New Machines To Break Language Barrier Tourists, Hispanics Both Gain Suburbia to Benefit, Also Juan Ramirez couldn't help noticing the gleaming new machine in the otherwise run-down shopping center in South Los Angeles. It wasn't so much the big "U.S. Government" emblem that caught his attention as the bright message in Spanish on its large screen. "Want U.S. Help? Ask Me." was its invitation. So Juan accepted. What he was seeing was the first of a new breed of machines which the Federal Government hopes will bring its services to everyone more quickly and more effectively; and of great interest to taxpayers, less expensively. If the Government has its way, these machines will be almost everywhere, and as their numbers increase the number of government office and clerks will gradually decrease. The machine Juan was using had been placed in the midst of an Hispanic community by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The INS is hoping to reduce the intimidation factor in its dealings with new arrivals, as well as help non-English- speaking immigrants wend their way through the maze of U.S. Government programs, rules and regulations. But INS's rules and regulations aren't all there is at the kiosk. There's also help with Social Security, taxation, job training, employment opportunities, housing, and occupational health and safety. The INS, IRS, Labor Department, Housing Department, and Social Security Administration all coming together in one machine? It boggles the mind for most people, but the explanation is simple. Two years ago, the Federal Government started building what they call a "Mail Users' Support Environment," or "M.U.S.E.". That's the name given to the electronic equivalent of the U.S. Postal Service for Federal Government mail that goes electronically, instead of on paper. And that electronic mail can be tax returns, immigration "papers," job training applications, and housing requests. The M.U.S.E. does for all Federal agencies what none could do for themselves. It links every city and town throughout the country with every Federal Government agency, regardless where the agency is located. What's more, the links can go directly into shopping malls, like the one being used by Juan Ramirez. When he went to the kiosk machine, Mr. Ramirez was invited to press a button that caused a menu to show up on the screen. It included social security, job training, health and safety, housing, and taxation, in addition to immigration. Last month, the Secretary of Health and Human Services announced that information about the new health care programs would soon be included. The kiosks aren't just information sources. They have the amazing ability to help people find the right government office to deal with their problems, and to send messages or required data to those offices. That ability comes from the electronic equivalent of the ordinary telephone directory Blue Pages. But these Blue Pages aren't like the ones on top of your refrigerator. The telephone Blue Pages just show the names of offices, which can be frustratingly cryptic. These say what the offices actually do. Moreover, they can be searched accordingly. Coming soon to your neighborhood library and school may be one of these machines, which also has in its directory what the M.U.S.E. calls its "Green Pages." These are a Blue Pages for researchers. Instead of names and activities of offices, they show names and descriptions of Federal Government databanks, libraries, electronic bulletin boards, and other hoards of useful information. While they don't hold the information itself, they tell you where and how to get it. As if all this weren't enough, Mr. Ramirez didn't have to use the keyboard to enter his message. The machine has a microphone into which people can speak. The voice message is put into an electronic "envelope" and sent over the M.U.S.E., just as easily as if it were spoken into an ordinary answering machine. Soon the machines will be appearing in major airports and National Parks. Tourists will be able to use them in several languages not only to "talk" with the National Park Service, but also to deal with the INS and, if need be, the State Department, on such things as visa matters, stolen property, or health problems that arise during their visits. When the M.U.S.E. was launched, the Secretary of Labor and the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development issued a joint statement saying that it was the single most important initiative for their departments of the last ten years, because it would enable their departments to do what they could never get sufficient funding to accomplish for themselves. M.U.S.E. Scenario -- COLLEGE STUDENTS: One Student's Story: How Exciting New Communications World Helps Little Guy When he finished his junior year at Riverside High School with a 3.3 grade-point average, Roger Bright became determined to attend a four-year college after graduation. He knew it would be difficult, because his father had just been laid off from work, and the future looked grim for his family. Roger was strong in math and science, and he loved to tinker with things mechanical. He was interested in politics, due largely to the recent election campaign and his father's misfortunes, but he found little enjoyment in literature. As he saw it, his future lay in engineering. Riverside's guidance office had just installed a modem on its computer, giving it access to subscription services, remote databases, and - through AT&T Mail - the Federal Government's new electronic mail support environment. Roger was eager to learn more about the results of the new legislation enlarging the National Service Plan, and asked his guidance counselor to inquire of the Department of Education about the current status. The counselor asked also that brochures be sent to the school. The Education Department replied with its preprogrammed message, and indicated that the counselor's address had been entered for brochure mailing as soon as they are printed. In his senior year, Roger was one of the lucky high school graduates to be accepted into the National Service program, and was doubly lucky to be accepted into the rigorous College of Engineering at his state's premier public university. That college not only provided all incoming freshmen with a recent-vintage personal computer, but also gave them access from their dorm rooms into the campus-wide network. The network was connected to the Internet, through which students, faculty and researchers could also connect into the Federal Government's mail environment (the "M.U.S.E."). When he talked with the officer at the College's R.O.T.C. Department, Roger became intrigued with that program, and wanted to know how his involvement with the National Service Plan would affect the possibility of his enrollment with the R.O.T.C. The officer hadn't yet encountered this question about the new program, so he used his computer to send an inquiry through the campus network, the Internet, and the M.U.S.E., into the Defense Department's Defense Messaging System, which delivered it to R.O.T.C. headquarters. Meanwhile, Roger decided to pursue one of his long- standing dreams, to land a Summer job with either the National Park Service or with the Forest Service in the State of Alaska. From his dorm room, he was able to access the government's electronic mail network Blue Pages, which he browsed for an appropriate addressee for his inquiries. The Park Service, in the Interior Department, had a listing under "Seasonal Employment;" but no such listing was found under the Agriculture Department's Forest Service. For the Forest Service, Roger sent his inquiry message to the Public Affairs office and also to the Personnel Office, both of which were listed. That Summer, in Alaska, when Roger received the letter his mother forwarded to him, he realized that he needed to communicate promptly with his college's R.O.T.C. Department. Roger's schedule was keeping him outdoors, and whenever he tried to make a voice call he got either no answer at all, or a busy signal. Finally, he decided to send an email message, asking for a time when he could reach someone there by telephone. He could do this because the Park Service's network was connected to the M.U.S.E., through which he could message out into his college network. Two days later his message was acknowl- edged, and a date and time for his voice call was set up. M.U.S.E. Scenario -- SCHOOLS, and HUMAN SERVICES: Inner City Efforts Get Boost From New Gov't Capabilities Central High School was once the crown jewel in the district's public school system. Today, it serves a much smaller school-age population in a low-income multi- lingual community, about to be hit hard by job cut-backs at the area's major employer. The School Board has worked out an arrangement with the state's Department of Human Services (DHS) to use a portion of Central's facilities for Senior Citizens services, and for a job placement and counseling office. The Board also managed to get funding for two powerful microcomputers configured for multimedia applications and for communications using dial-up modems. One was installed in the Library, and the other in the Guidance Center. The school office was already on a computer network for its administrative functions. The DHS decided to equip both the Senior Center and the Job Referral office with computers and modems. Both can dial into the city's host computer system, which in turn links into the state's network. That network is connected to the Federal Government's electronic Mail Users' Support Environment (M.U.S.E.). The school district has its own host computer into which Central's new computers can dial, and which is also linked to the M.U.S.E. via the state's network. The Senior Center is able to offer a variety of services through its computer. The primary use is in connection with local matters, but assistance is also given for many Federal actions. Of course, taxation and Social Security messages and filings account for the heaviest M.U.S.E. use, but there is a surprisingly large amount of activity with the Department of Veterans' Affairs (VA). All the VA hospitals and clinics participate in the M.U.S.E., as do the Public Health Service facilities. As one would expect, appointments can be arranged by electronic mail. More important, however, the doctors value the M.U.S.E. because it gives them easy communication links with private sector and HMO physicians, as well as with a wide range of Government and non-government institutions. (In fact, the M.U.S.E. has made a big impact on health care in medically-underserved areas, because of its almost instantaneous delivery of messages dealing with symptomology and therapy.) Central's multi-lingual community finds the M.U.S.E. to be of particular benefit, because messages can be sent in a person's native language, and translated upon receipt. That way, the citizen doesn't have to deal with the problem of being connected at the other end of a voice call with a government worker with whom the citizen can't converse. Like the Senior Center's, most of the Job Referral office's communications are local, but it also benefits from the M.U.S.E. The U.S. Department of Labor has established several "bulletin board" types of services that are usable via the M.U.S.E., and it has also set up distribution lists of job centers in different parts of the country to which it regularly sends notices and other pertinent items. As for the school's new computers, both the Librarian and Guidance counselors have been extremely gratified by their impact. Quite apart from being able to take advan- tage of the many offerings on CD/ROM, they let the school link up with almost any Federal facility and program via the M.U.S.E.. Students use them to get information about armed forces recruitment possibilities, and even to file preliminary applications; as well as to inquire of the Office of Personnel Management about job opportunities in the area, and to apply for Civil Service testing. In the M.U.S.E.'s Green Pages, the Librarian discovered, among other things, that the Department of Education issues periodic bulletins about new offerings on CD/ROM, which can be obtained upon request via the M.U.S.E. M.U.S.E. Scenario -- LARGE CORPORATIONS: Major Widget Corporation Saves Millions; Fed. Govt. Now Getting Info Act Together While all of America benefits in one way or another from the Federal Government's creation of its electronic Mail Users' Support Environment (M.U.S.E.), no party benefits more than large enterprises. These include not only "Fortune 500" corporations, but also banks, public utilities, universities, and other institutions with multi-million dollar budgets. What all of these organizations have in common is an electronic messaging infrastructure already in place, just waiting to operate with the M.U.S.E., via whichever value-added network each has chosen to be its commercial service provider. The Major Widget Corporation (MWC) is typical. MWC's service provider is SPRINT, which, like all its competitors, connects with the M.U.S.E. * MWC's chemical subsidiary deals regularly with the E.P.A., reporting waste discharges and negotiating about its responsibilities in certain cleanup efforts. Using authentication and non-repudiation procedures, the E.P.A. has enabled MWC to replace paper with electronics. Because the M.U.S.E. supports messaging of more than mere text and data, the MWC finds it can send maps, engineering drawings, and even scanned photographs, all electronically, via SprintMail and the M.U.S.E. * Being in the chemical, as well as the construction industries, MWC is very sensitive to its responsibilities for occupational health and safety. The government people at OSHA saw quickly that the M.U.S.E. would be a wonderful vehicle for disseminating directly to designated corporate offices their latest bulletins and notices, as well as both proposed and final regulations. The OSHA people set up distribution lists by subject-matter, industry, and even by geographic regions. A notice is "mailed" to an entire distribution list by just giving the name of the list, and OSHA receives electronic confirmation of its delivery to each addressee in the list. * MWC recently acquired a new firm with a significant new approach to regulating incinerator performance. The technology involved required that export licensing be undertaken with the Commerce Department, and MWC was delighted to learn that by using the M.U.S.E. for the filings and negotiations, it could greatly reduce the time usually taken in the old paper-handling days. * When MWC decided to enlarge its capital base with a new stock issuance, it found that it could conduct electronically, via the M.U.S.E., much of the necessary interactions with the S.E.C. When it became known that the capital would be used to acquire the second-largest firm in the part of the waste-processing business in which MWC was already dominant, the company found itself using the M.U.S.E. for interactions with the F.T.C. and the Justice Department's Antitrust Division. * MWC intends to allocate a portion of the new capital to its fledgling pharmaceutical division, which is anxious to pursue product development of its recent discovery which shows promise as an anti-viral agent. The product development process involves considerable interaction with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and this interaction is greatly facilitated by the M.U.S.E. In fact, the capabilities of the M.U.S.E. have made a noticable impact on the total elapsed time required for FDA drug licensing. * As soon as the M.U.S.E. was put into operation, the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service started to use it for electronic reporting of formatted data. MWC saw very early the advantages in using the electronic mode of reporting to Federal Government agencies. Not only does it dispense with the physical medium of paper, but, more important, electronic communication allows a rapid acknowledgement of receipt, and identification and correction of any errors. Part IV: Operational Characteristics of the Government-wide Electronic Mail Users' Support Environment (M.U.S.E.) TABLE OF CONTENTS SECTION 1 - INTRODUCTION 1.1 Purpose 1.2 Scope 1.3 Approach 1.4 Design Philosophy 1.4.1 Transport Unity 1.4.2 Point of Connection 1.5 Terminology SECTION 2 - TRANSPORT CHARACTERISTICS 2.1 Introduction 2.2 General Characteristics 2.3 Specific Characteristics 2.3.1 Connectivity/Interoperability 2.3.2 Guaranteed Delivery/Accountability 2.3.3 Timely Delivery 2.3.4 Confidentiality/Security 2.3.5 Sender Authentication/Identification 2.3.6 Message and System Integrity 2.3.7 Survivability 2.3.8 Availability/Reliability 2.3.9 Ease of Use 2.3.10 Identification of Recipients 2.3.11 Message Preparation Support 2.3.12 Storage and Retrieval Support 2.3.13 Distribution List Support SECTION 3 - DIRECTORY CHARACTERISTICS 3.1 Introduction 3.2 General Characteristics 3.3 Specific Characteristics 3.3.1 White Pages 3.3.2 Blue Pages 3.3.3 Yellow Pages 3.3.4 Green Pages 3.3.5 Common Characteristics 3.3.6 Management and Maintenance APPENDIX A - Definition of Terms SECTION 1 - INTRODUCTION 1.1 PURPOSE The following presents a formal statement of functionalities for the Federal Government-wide Electronic Mail Users' Support Environment (M.U.S.E.). These operational characteristics are based on the vision for the M.U.S.E. expressed in the preceding three parts of the M.U.S.E. Final Report. They are written from a high-level point of view and are expressed in terms of transport and directory attributes. They have been developed to convey the M.U.S.E. vision in specific, detailed and, wherever possible, quantitative/qualitative statements. 1.2 SCOPE The M.U.S.E. is envisioned as supporting the entire Federal Government, all three branches - Legislative, Judicial, and Executive. When implemented, the Legislative and/or Judicial Branch may opt to participate less than fully. At a minimum, the M.U.S.E. will have the capability to support the entire Executive Branch. 1.3 APPROACH Readers may notice similarities with the "Required Operational Messaging Characteristics (ROMC)" for the Defense Message System (DMS), issued in April 1993. The M.U.S.E. working group has chosen to parallel the DMS's ROMC in this document, because it regards the ROMC as thorough, well organized, and clearly stated at an appropriate level of detail. In the process of adapting the ROMC document, the working group has made many modifications that it felt were needed by the government- wide perspective. Readers are cautioned to approach this as a separate document from the DMS ROMC, and to understand it in light of the vision for the M.U.S.E. as expressed in the other three parts of the Final Report. These characteristics do not supersede or impact upon the DMS ROMC. Its authors have included participants from the Department of Defense who have ensured its coordination, such that the M.U.S.E. and the DMS can and will be interoperable. Readers are cautioned that the following is not a substitute for, or formalized restatement of what is conveyed in the preceding parts of the Final Report. A reading of those pages is requisite to understanding the rationale for the functionalities itemized below. 1.4 DESIGN PHILOSOPHY 1.4.1 Transport Unity The M.U.S.E. is a nation-wide electronic mail (e- mail) transport environment, supported by comprehensive directory services, to meet the full mission/program needs of the Federal Government. It transports e-mail not only between Federal organizations that have their own internal e-mail systems, but also between those organizations and parties outside the government. With few exceptions, the ultimate creation and delivery of e-mail occurs at workstations, portable devices, etc., connected to the e-mail systems of individual agencies. Each of these systems connects to the M.U.S.E. either directly, or via one or more other agency-unique systems. The M.U.S.E. will be capable of providing everything that Federal agencies will need to connect to the outside world for the receipt of official documents and data filings in electronic form, and the for the conduct of those electronic commerce and agency programmatic activities that can flow via e-mail. It will also be the principal means through which every Federal agency will have the capability of conducting business electronically with every other agency throughout the entire Federal Government, regardless of Department, etc., where "business" is everything that can flow in an electronic store-and-forward process. In a simple sense, the M.U.S.E. can be seen as a unified mail transport arrangement, providing interoperation among hundreds of separate agency e- mail systems throughout the nation, and the entire "outside world." The "outside world" is the myriad non-Federal systems that handle e-mail, including commercial carriers, value-added networks (VANs), the Internet, and networks operated by state and local governments or their surrogates. The M.U.S.E. is not a physical arrangement, and might use a national data superhighway in much the same way that Postal Service trucks use the Interstate highways and airplanes use the air navigation routes. 1.4.2 Point of Connection Whenever e-mail is discussed, the term "gateway" is understood to refer to a point of connection between two systems that operate differently, using different technologies. Ultimately, it is hoped that Federal agencies will employ for their own mail systems the same technology used in the M.U.S.E. This will obviate the need for a gateway between the two, and they will be able to interoperate in a common native mode. However, as a practical matter it is likely that there will always be some agency e-mail systems that operate differently from the M.U.S.E. The authors of these characteristics considered creating a term such as "entry/exit" to indicate the point at which the M.U.S.E. meets agency and outside world e-mail systems, regardless of the technology of the respective systems. That is the boundary of the M.U.S.E. Instead of creating a new term of their own, the authors elected to use "gateway" in the broadest possible sense, to encompass connections between both like and unlike systems. In these characteristics, it connotes the operational boundary between the M.U.S.E. and systems operated by others, i.e., agencies and non-Federal parties. The M.U.S.E. comprises everything between the gateways. It does not include what is beyond the gateways, for that falls under the management and operational control of others. 1.5 TERMINOLOGY Appendix A lists several terms used herein, with their definitions. In addition, these characteristics statements adopt and use the basic terms found in the international standards known by their popular designations, "X.400" and "X.500," and used also throughout the e-mail publications of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Appendix A does not reproduce those term definitions, e.g., "user agent," and "message transfer agent." Readers not familiar with such basic terms are referred to the international and NIST standards publications. Some terms are introduced and defined in context, in which case they may not be listed in Appendix A. The authors have concentrated on clarity and precision of expression, and have not felt compelled to make Appendix A an exhaustive list. The terms "e-mail" and "messaging" are used synonymously and interchangeably. In so doing, the authors intend the broadest sense of the terms, namely the transport and delivery by a store-and-forward process of anything that can be expressed in digital electronic form, including what are popularly called "binary attachments." Unless otherwise stated explicitly, the term "delivery" refers to the delivery of mail by the M.U.S.E. to those other e-mail systems which are between the M.U.S.E. and the actual senders/writers and receivers/readers of the mail which the M.U.S.E. transports. Delivery takes place at the M.U.S.E.'s operational boundary. SECTION 2 - TRANSPORT CHARACTERISTICS 2.1 INTRODUCTION This section states the characteristics needed by all parties, both Federal and non-Federal, for the reliability aspects of electronic mail as it is expected to be used for the transfer of information subject to legal and regulatory requirements, with their concomitant penalties, and for the conduct of procurement activities. The expression "business quality" reflects the ability to support the enforcement of government rules, regulations, contracts and transactions. In general, the M.U.S.E. must provide the electronic equivalents to the progressive levels of postal mail and its value-added features, e.g., First-class, Priority and Express mail, return receipts, and tracking/tracing. 2.2 GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS A. The M.U.S.E. shall provide all of the e-mail transport and supporting services listed below, to and from all Federal Government offices and facilities, by means of interconnection with agency e-mail systems. B. The M.U.S.E. will be available to all citizens, enterprises, organizations, and all state and local governmental bodies, by means of interconnection with commercial networks, VANs, the Internet, and non- Federal public-sector networks. C. The M.U.S.E. shall reliably transport and protect information of all sensitivity or classification levels. D. The M.U.S.E. shall transport mail that conveys documents, images, recorded sounds, and such other information objects as may recorded digitally. E. The M.U.S.E. must provide a standard gateway interface to which both agency and non-Federal systems may adapt. F. The M.U.S.E. shall be based upon the principles of standardization and interoperability, while preserving adaptability to implement new functionalities and support new technologies. G. Federal Information Processing Standards shall apply to the M.U.S.E. 2.3 SPECIFIC CHARACTERISTICS 2.3.1 Connectivity/Interoperability a. Connectivity is viewed as extending from writer to reader. The writers and readers will be located on agency e-mail systems and on e- mail systems operated by the non-Federal parties with whom agencies conduct their mission and business activities. Agency systems may rely on the M.U.S.E. to transport messages between geographic locations served by the system, as well as to and from parties outside the agency system. Thus, the M.U.S.E. may serve as a backbone for an agency system, as well as provide interoperability with the outside world. b. The gateway specifications needed to support the connectivity and interoperability will be documented thoroughly, and published by the Federal Government. c. Eventually, all connection options will be supported, including wireless. d. The M.U.S.E. will connect to such Federal Government "kiosk" devices as are installed in public places anywhere in the nation. These devices may or may not be installed on agency systems. Most are likely to be free-standing units capable of sending e-mail traffic to one or more agencies, which may be in different Departments or even different Branches. e. The M.U.S.E. will interoperate with the global networking arrangement known as the Internet. 2.3.2 Guaranteed Delivery/Accountability a. The M.U.S.E. must account for all messages handled, including the location, date and time at which a message enters the M.U.S.E., and the location, date and time at which it leaves the M.U.S.E. The M.U.S.E. must provide the capability of returning to the entry gateway a delivery notification showing the location, date and time at which the message was handed off to the destination gateway. Both entry and exit (delivery) times are to be expressed as local time. b. The M.U.S.E. will match its delivery records against its entry records, and will generate a notice to a message writer whenever the entry record lacks a matching delivery record. The implementation of this process will vary according to the precedence level of messages. No non-delivery shall go undetected. c. The operational performance and integrity of the M.U.S.E. shall be sufficient to guarantee delivery to the destination agency gateway with a probability greater than .9995. d. The M.U.S.E. shall guarantee that if any message is broken into segments the destination gateway will be presented the message as it had entered initially into the M.U.S.E. e. The M.U.S.E. shall provide message accountability and audit trail for all messages based on a globally unique message identifier which supports (a) analysis of both security monitoring and security related events (i.e., successful/unsuccessful log-in attempts, violation of security policy, release of messages, etc.) and also (b) message traceability from the source. 2.3.3 Timely Delivery a. The M.U.S.E. must recognize messages that require preferential handling. The urgency of the most critical information requires handling above and beyond simple priority. The M.U.S.E. must dynamically adjust to changing traffic loads and conditions to provide timely delivery of critical information during periods of both peace and crisis. Delivery time for a given message will be a function of message precedence and system stress level. b. The M.U.S.E. will recognize four levels of precedence, or grades of delivery, from lowest to highest as follows: 1. "OVERNIGHT." Messages entering from non-Federal Government originators, for overnight delivery. Examples would be mailings of messages to numerous Representatives and Senators concerning pending legislation, or bulk-mailed invitations from government suppliers to attend product announcement briefings. 2. "NINETY-MINUTE." Regular message handling, for normal system first-in, first-out processing speed. Delivery will be within ninety (90) minutes, at least 99.5 percent of the time. If no other grade of delivery is specified, this will be the grade selected (the default value). 3. "TEN-MINUTE." Priority delivery, for messages originating either in Federal offices or in non-Federal Government sites. Priority messages will be limited to single addresses, because this level of precedence is expected to be used for such things as filings that must meet deadlines, e.g., those established in court procedures, or at the Securities and Exchange Commission. The M.U.S.E. will guarantee delivery of a priority message received from any gateway in the United States to any other gateway anywhere in the United States within ten minutes, at least 99.5 percent of the time. 4. "IMMEDIATE." Immediate delivery, for messages originating in certain (not all) Federal Government offices. Delivery will be within ninety (90) seconds, at least 99.5 percent of the time. Multi-addressed messages will be permitted in this level of precedence. c. Messages will be processed and delivered to destination gateways in First-In-First-Out (FIFO) by category/precedence order. Lower precedence message traffic will not delay higher precedence message traffic. d. The M.U.S.E., in collaboration with agencies when connectivity with their systems is designed, will endeavor to have alternate delivery gateways. When an agency gateway is inoperative, for whatever reason, the M.U.S.E. will seek to deliver it to an alternate gateway. e. The M.U.S.E. will note the entry time (to the M.U.S.E.) of all TEN-MINUTE messages it receives for transfer, and will have a means of ascertaining its failure to deliver such messages within the ten minute guarantee. This may be noted at the time the message is delivered to the destination gateway. It must be ascertained within fifteen minutes for TEN- MINUTE messages not delivered within that time. f. When a TEN-MINUTE or a NINETY-MINUTE message cannot be or has not been delivered within the ten minute or ninety minute guarantee, the M.U.S.E. will generate a notification message to the writer informing the writer of the delivery failure and the reason for that failure. The notification will be such as to meet the writer's need for legally admissible and credible evidence to support the writer's claim of having made a best effort to meet a filing deadline. g. The M.U.S.E. will hold an undelivered TEN- MINUTE message that it ascertains as not having been delivered within the ten minute period, and will generate a message (TEN MINUTE) asking the writer if the writer wishes delayed delivery of the TEN-MINUTE message, as if it were a NINETY- MINUTE message. If an affirmative response is not received within thirty minutes, the TEN- MINUTE message will be expunged, with an accompanying notification message to the writer. h. IMMEDIATE messages that cannot be delivered within 90 seconds, either because a routing path cannot be established or because a delivery gateway cannot be reached, will be expunged, with notification (IMMEDIATE) to their writers. The writers will have the option of (1) resubmitting such a message right away under a lower precedence or (2) resubmitting it as IMMEDIATE, but to an alternate address, or (3) waiting a while to resubmit as IMMEDIATE, or (4) not resubmitting at all. i. For OVERNIGHT and NINETY-MINUTE messages, unsuccessful delivery attempts will be retried at intervals not greater than twenty minutes. j. When a NINETY-MINUTE message has not been delivered within eight hours, a second non- delivery notice will be generated to the writer, and the message will be removed (expunged) from the M.U.S.E. While eight hours is the default value for removal, writers will be able to specify some other value between 90 minutes and 48 hours. k. When an OVERNIGHT message has not been delivered by 4:00 p.m. reader's local time on the day following its entry into the M.U.S.E., a non-delivery notice will be generated to the writer, and the message will be removed (expunged). l. The M.U.S.E. will establish a standard format for acknowledgement to writers of message receipt by addressed readers. The format will include, as mandatory, the date and time the message was "opened" by the reader, and the level of authentication that was associated with the reader. This will apply to all systems connected to the M.U.S.E., both Federal and non- Federal. It will be the responsibility of each connected system to present to the M.U.S.E., at its gateway, such acknowledgement messages return-addressed to writers, in the format prescribed by the M.U.S.E. However, the generation of such acknowledgement messages will not be mandatory, but if an agency system does it for one of its attached parties it must do it for all. The M.U.S.E. will note in its Directory whether or not a listed party supplies the standard receipt message. m. The M.U.S.E. will have the capability of sending the receipts in a form other than by return e-mail, e.g., by facsimile and/or postal mail. The most common use of this service will be in the case of messages originated at kiosk devices or in libraries and schools. It may also come into use for messages originating from wireless devices. If a receipt is to be returned by other than e-mail, that fact must somehow be incorporated into the receipt when it is given to the M.U.S.E. for transport. The M.U.S.E. will not be expected to extract and retain receipt address information from original messages transported. 2.3.4 Confidentiality/Security a. Confidentiality precludes access to, or release of, information to unauthorized users. The M.U.S.E. must process and protect all message traffic. Security is based upon requirements for integrity and authentication as well as confidentiality. b. As soon as messages are completely and successfully delivered to their destination gateways, they shall be removed (expunged) from the M.U.S.E. All that will remain is the accounting record of entry and delivery. That record will include message size measurements, authentication data, and perhaps also the audit trail of message transfer agents that processed the message, but no more. All message archiving will be performed in agency systems. c. Provision will be made for the irrevocable emergency destruction of stored, undelivered messages, where necessary and when needed. 2.3.5 Sender Authentication/Identification a. The M.U.S.E. must compare the origination address of messages with information associated with each gateway, to ascertain that the origination address is valid with respect to the gateway across which the message enters the M.U.S.E. b. When a message enters the M.U.S.E. for transfer, it must bear some unambiguous identification of the system from which it came. If the identification is lacking, the M.U.S.E. will insert it. c. Kiosk devices attached to the M.U.S.E. will be expected to generate an unambiguous origin identification. The assignment of identifiers and their management will be a responsibility of the operations management of the M.U.S.E. d. Sender authentication will be performed at the time a writer submits a message, and/or by an agency system when a message has been delivered to it by the M.U.S.E. For example, authentication may be performed at a kiosk not located on Federal premises or attached to some agency system, and it may also be performed at an agency procurement office system for a message that was originated on some merchant's office computer and sent to the M.U.S.E. via the merchant's VAN. e. Both authentication and confidentiality may be supported by the use of what is popularly called "public-key encryption." To the extent that this is used by parties connected to the M.U.S.E., the public keys for those parties will be displayed in the M.U.S.E.'s Directory. 2.3.6 Message and System Integrity a. The M.U.S.E. will not cause a message to lose, add, or modify the body (text or data) of the message. Unauthorized combining of messages either by intermixing or concatenating during submission, validation, processing, or delivery is prohibited. b. Information received must have the same content and organization as information sent. However, in recognition of the diversity of software that generates information products such as documents, the M.U.S.E. shall offer a capability of reformatting messages, if requested by the message originator. This can relieve individual agency systems from the expense of duplicating a service that can be made available by the M.U.S.E. on a large scale to all users. c. At the behest of an agency, the M.U.S.E. will contain information in its Directory that indicates software characteristics associated with Federal Government addressees. For example, it may note the particular word processing/document software used. If the M.U.S.E. offers a conversion capability from word processing software X to software Y, the service shall be offered to writers, who shall be able to invoke it at their option (subject to privacy/security constraints). Writers who do not wish to use the service will be informed through the Directory what alternatives are acceptable to destination agency readers. This conversion service is seen as a temporary measure until document transfers employ standard encodings, such as those set forth in the Open (formerly "Office") Document Architecture (ODA) international standards. d. The M.U.S.E. will provide safeguards against accidental, unauthorized, or malicious actions that result in the (1) alteration of security protection mechanisms or access levels, (2) alteration of the security classification levels, (3) alteration/change of addressing or routing information, (4) alteration of audit information, and (5) disruption of service. e. The M.U.S.E. will provide support for auditing, to include the following: 1. A message audit trail that provides information to support fault isolation, as well as performance and security monitoring. 2. Configuration monitoring and control. 3. Status monitoring and performance assessment. 4. Fault isolation and correction. 5. System component internal control information. f. No single hardware, software, and/or human error malfunction should allow security checks to be bypassed. g. Protection should be provided against message looping and message shuttling within the M.U.S.E. h. The M.U.S.E. should incorporate self-test and diagnostic features, as well as supporting maintenance documentation. In addition, the M.U.S.E. should include features for the testing of system gateways, and connecting system compliance with M.U.S.E. standards and procedures. i. All M.U.S.E. software and hardware should be designed and implemented in accordance with applicable Federal Government standards; and it should be modular to facilitate the ability to add, remove, replace, or modify with little or no impact to operations and/or security. Products used should be tested and/or certified to the extent such capabilities exist. 2.3.7 Survivability a. The M.U.S.E. must provide a service that can survive reasonably-anticipated natural events. It must not degrade the survivability of systems interfaced to it. Methods such as redundancy, proliferation of system assets, and distributed processing may be employed. Surviving segments must be capable of reconstitution. b. The M.U.S.E. will provide for graceful system degradation and orderly system recovery from failures, in accordance with applicable restoration priorities. Surviving system segments must be capable of reconstitution as a system to provide essential messaging services to surviving writers and readers. 2.3.8 Availability/Reliability a. The M.U.S.E. must provide message service on a continuous basis. The availability should be achieved by a combination of highly reliable and readily maintainable components, thoroughly tested software, and necessary operational procedures. b. Gateway-to-gateway availability shall be at least 98.5 percent for all gateways within the contiguous 48 states, and 95 percent for gateways in Alaska and Hawaii. c. The M.U.S.E. will provide contingency mechanisms for recovery from accidental, unauthorized, or hostile actions that result in the inability to use system services. d. All M.U.S.E. components shall have a common time standard that is synchronized to within 30 seconds of the Universal Time Coordinate provided by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. e. The M.U.S.E. will provide the ability to expeditiously adapt to changes in the number, type, location, and capability of agency systems, and to the traffic volumes and patterns associated with those systems. Similar capabilities will be provided for gateways to non-Federal message transport systems. f. The M.U.S.E. shall be sized adequately to preclude denial of service to writers and readers under normal and stressed situations. 2.3.9 Ease of Use a. The M.U.S.E. is founded on two principals: commonality of access to all Federal Government offices through a standardized mechanism analogous to postal addressing and telephone dialing, and a unified Directory analogous to the postal ZIP code and telephone directories. It must be no more difficult for the general public to use than the current postal and telephone systems. b. Although the M.U.S.E. will operate on addressing prescribed by the Federal Information Processing Standards, it will use its Directory services to enable writers to acquire addresses on the basis of some simple action, for example, the selection of the desired reader from a list appearing in the Directory. Writers will not have to know or be aware of the actual addresses used by the M.U.S.E. in transporting their messages. Writers shall be able to indicate the intended recipient(s) using aliases or other mnemonics which do not require a complete knowledge of the actual message addresses used by the M.U.S.E. (See also 2.3.10 e., below.) 2.3.10 Identification of Recipients a. Writers must be able to unambiguously identify to the M.U.S.E. the intended recipient of each message sent. The necessary directories and their authenticity are part of the M.U.S.E., as set forth in Section 3 of this document. b. Because of shortcomings in directory content, organization, display, or accessing, writer software, or human error, a writer may not find the intended recipient, or may be unsure of that party. To assist in such situations, the M.U.S.E. will provide the equivalent of a telephone system "information operator" or a postal system clerk. The assistance will take two forms, as follows: 1. An "800" voice number will be provided for both directory assistance and incident reporting. The number will be staffed at all times, 24 hours a day, every day of the year. 2. An inquiry message will be able to be sent to the "M.U.S.E.", which will have the equivalent of a postal clerk on duty at all times to respond to such messages. c. Writers must have the capability to generate messages for single or multiple recipients. The M.U.S.E. will have the capability of processing messages with multiple addressees, but will normally confine that capability to messages originating within the Federal Government. In general, messages originating outside the Federal Government will be restricted to a single addressee per message. The M.U.S.E. must have the capability of recognizing non-Federal writers who have been authorized to send multi- addressed messages to Federal recipients. d. The M.U.S.E. must not accept for transport a message from a non-Federal Government party to a non-Federal Government party. Either the writer or reader must be a Federal Government party. e. The M.U.S.E. will recognize and understand addresses associated with the world-wide transport arrangement known as the Internet. It will deliver to the Internet messages originating on agency systems which bear such destination addresses. When the M.U.S.E. is given such messages by the Internet for delivery to agency e-mail systems, its internal transport may use those addresses, or it may use a translation between those addresses and the Federal standard addresses. The M.U.S.E. Directory will have the capability of providing Internet addresses for agency gateways that have obtained such addresses. 2.3.11 Message Preparation Support a. The M.U.S.E. will not operate User Agent services. However, to support small government agencies which lack the resources to install their own messaging systems, the M.U.S.E. will make available one or more microcomputer or workstation-based systems that have been configured to provide a user agent compatible with the M.U.S.E. The interface between such configurations and the M.U.S.E. will not involve a gateway, but will conform to the native mode of operation of the M.U.S.E. b. Kiosk devices attached directly to the M.U.S.E. will conform to specifications established by the M.U.S.E. Message preparation on such devices will adhere to the principle of utmost simplicity. 2.3.12 Storage and Retrieval Support The M.U.S.E. will not provide message store capabilities, and will not keep messages for any purpose other than a temporary holding pending delivery to system gateways that are unavailable at the time messages are presented for delivery. Once a message has been delivered to a destination gateway, storage for such purposes as user agent retrieval, archiving and forwarding to third parties becomes the responsibility of the agency or the non-Federal system. 2.3.13 Distribution List Support a. Distribution lists in the e-mail environment for the Federal Government will be of two kinds: those that are unique to a single agency, and those that are shared by two or more agencies. Lists unique to a single agency must be kept and maintained within that agency's system. Lists that are shared by two or more agencies may be kept in the M.U.S.E. b. Each distribution list kept in the M.U.S.E. will have a unique name. A message sent from an agency to that name will be delivered by the M.U.S.E. to the gateway associated with each entry in the list, with the messages bearing the destination addresses as shown in the list. c. Each distribution list kept in the M.U.S.E. will have a designated "owner," who shall be responsible for the sharing, maintenance and reliability of the list. Each owner, in turn, will designate (a) parties authorized to modify the list, and (b) parties authorized to use the list. Those designations will be kept in the M.U.S.E., and the M.U.S.E. will exercise custodianship control over the list in accordance with these designations. Associated security procedures are likely to involve authentication mechanisms. SECTION 3 - DIRECTORY CHARACTERISTICS 3.1 INTRODUCTION The Directory may well be the single most important aspect of the M.U.S.E. It serves three purposes. First, it helps mail originators locate the appropriate receivers for their communications. Second, it provides to originators the electronic form of a receiver's address, in a manner transparent to the originator. That is, originators who are able to use the Directory need not be concerned with, and may not even be aware of, the actual address being used by the M.U.S.E. to route a message. Third, it is an adjunct to an agency's business processes by performing information processing functions above and beyond the simple asquisition of addresses. 3.2 GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS The Directory is divided logically into parts, each with its own information content and organization, but synchronized for consistency. The best analogy, and the one used in this document, is the division of the telephone directory into different-colored pages. Everything in the telephone directory is there for the purpose of finding telephone numbers, regardless where or how it is listed. The same is true for finding e-mail addresses in the Directory. When a directory is printed, the manner in which its contents are searched and displayed is generally quite straightforward. Telephone directory information is presented a single way, in alphabetic sequence, with cross-reference index information being provided only for the Yellow pages. Some third-party publishers issue supplementary directories in alternative sequence, usually by telephone number and by street address within ZIP code. However, when a directory is stored in a computer system, not printed, and available only via electronic inquiry, the aspects of searching and information display become extremely important. Considering the size and diversity of the Federal Government, including its geographical dispersion, and the basic architecture of the M.U.S.E. as a transport system among connected agency and non-Federal systems, it is only natural that the M.U.S.E.'s Directory will work in conjunction with the directories of its connected systems. Those directories will each have their own ways of organizing and displaying information, which will probably differ from the M.U.S.E.'s, but those differences need not preclude the two working together to minimize difficulties for message originators. The underlying philosophy of the Directory is that its contents are open to all to see. If an agency has persons or offices that it does not wish to expose to the general public, it must refrain from listing them in the open M.U.S.E. Directory, and must assume responsibility for controlling access to and use of its internal directories in which such private addresses are displayed. It is recognized that the following characteristics go well beyond what are today the most commonly-held views of an e-mail system directory. It is also recognized that these characteristics will probably require some interactive usage capability in order to realize their maximum potential. However, they are considered essential if the full cost-benefit of the M.U.S.E. is to be achieved. 3.3 SPECIFIC CHARACTERISTICS The M.U.S.E.'s Directory will be organized into four logical groupings, independently accessed and searched, but with their contents synchronized for consistency. Three of the four will correspond to the popularly-known colored pages of many current telephone directories, namely White, Blue, and Yellow. The fourth part, called "Green," is a directory of Information holdings and sources. It provides functionalities associated with what has been called the "Federal (or Government) Information Locator System/Service." Users of the Directory must be able to select initially the database/page set being accessed. 3.3.1 White Pages The White Pages will contain the e-mail addresses corresponding to the names of individual persons. The names of Federal organizations or programs will not be in the White Pages, but will be in the Blue Pages. There is no expectation that the White Pages will contain entries for all three million or so employees of the three Branches of the Federal Government. While that possibility is not excluded, it is more likely that most of those addresses will be found only in agency system directories. When implemented, the White Page entries in the M.U.S.E. Directory might actually feature just Representatives, Senators, and senior Executive Branch officials. a. Names must be searchable (1) by last name alone, (2) by last name in conjunction with one or more initials, (3) by last name in conjunction with one or more additional names, (4) by last name in conjunction with one or more additional names plus one or more initials, and (5) all of the foregoing in conjunction with an agency identification and/or geographic location. b. Although not needed initially, it will be highly desirable to incorporate a phonetic search capability within three years following creation of the White Pages. c. The White Pages must contain the agency identification and geographic location of each person listed, and both must be able to be displayed and must be usable in qualifying a search. d. In recognition that some officials may have more than one address, e.g., legislators with both home district/state and Capitol offices, the White Pages will be capable of carrying such multiple listings, with one being designated as the default address. When a writer enters a distinguished name for which two or more addresses are shown, the default address will be inserted. 3.3.2 Blue Pages The Blue Pages will contain listings for Federal offices, programs, and activities. Each entry will be qualified by geographic location. Each office entry must be able to be qualified by up to three abbreviations or common aliases, by its immediately superior and immediately subordinate offices (where such offices exist) and by up to three functional programs or activities. Each program or activity listing must be able to be qualified by agency name. a. Offices must be cross-referenced to their corresponding programs or activities, when such programs or activities are identified. b. Directory users must be able to interrogate the Blue Pages on the basis of program or activity, qualified optionally by geographic location and/or agency name. c. Directory users must be able to identify the programs or activities associated with an office, and also the offices immediately superior and subordinate to any office. d. The Blue Pages will be able to reflect information about agency system directories, to the extent that agencies are willing to open that information to the public. Such information may include a description of how "query-by-mail" may be used. 3.3.3 Yellow Pages The Yellow Pages will support the programmatic and commercial activities of agencies and offices. They will be an essential ingredient of the Federal Government's move towards what is popularly called "electronic commerce" or "electronic data interchange." These terms are usually written as "EC" and "EDI" or "EC/EDI." Electronic commerce is the broader term, encompassing EDI, and this document uses EC to include EDI. EC encompasses the entire process of agency procurement and contract administration, from initial requisition to final payment. The Yellow Pages will support that process for both agencies and private sector enterprises that conduct business with the Federal Government. All procurement offices, contractors and suppliers listed in the Yellow Pages will have an e-mail address. Because the EC term can also be applied to agency program activities other than procurement of goods and services, the Yellow Pages will contain listings of non-Federal parties involved in program activities of different agencies, where the agencies can realize shared benefits from such listings. These characteristics are written in terms of procurement activities, but their generic capabilities are expected to apply to listings of parties other than commercial trading partners. a. The Yellow Pages will list Federal contractors, qualified by their industry identification codes, the agencies with which they have contracts, their product or service categories, the geographic areas in which they provide those products and services, any special statutory or regulatory programs under which they can contract, and their parent or subsidiary identities as appropriate. b. The Yellow Pages will list agency procurement offices, qualified by the scope of their authority and/or constituency, and also by the categories of products and services purchased. c. The Yellow Pages will list suppliers of goods and services who have been certified for sales to agencies, or who have not been excluded from such sales for cause, qualified by their industry identification codes, the product or service categories in which they wish to compete for agency contracts, the geographic areas in which they wish to compete for agency contracts, any special statutory or regulatory programs under which they can contract, and any needed parent/subsidiary identities. d. An agency procurement office must be able to use the Yellow Pages to generate a list of prospective bidders, employing criteria of product or service category, geographic area, and special statutory or regulatory contracting program. The list will be returned to the requesting procurement office in the form of a distribution list, which the procurement office can use to send multi-addressed messages. e. The Yellow Pages must be able to be interrogated and browsed by product or service category, qualified by geographic location. It must also be possible to request display of the entry for a particular Federal procurement office, or contractor or supplier by name. 3.3.4 Green Pages The Green Pages are listings of information holdings and sources throughout the Federal Government. They indicate what information is available and where it is available, and possibly also how to get it. The Green Pages may incorporate catalog information from the Government Printing Office, the National Technical Information Service, and other such Federal publishers or providers, but they will not be expected to incorporate the catalogs of Federal library holdings. The Green Pages are intended to be a simple pointer to information in the way that the Blue Pages are a pointer to services. a. The Green Pages must be able to be interrogated by simple subject-matter descriptors. The descriptors shall be cross- referenced to broader, narrower, and related descriptors. b. Green Pages entries may or may not have an associated e-mail address, but if a Green Pages entry includes an e-mail contact it shall be possible for an interrogator to acquire the e- mail address in the process of the Directory inquiry. c. The Green Pages must be able to reflect descriptive information about directories or catalogs in Federal agencies that can be accessed via e-mail. Such information may include content and structure, as well as how "query-by-mail" may be used. d. If the M.U.S.E. provides interactive searching of the Directory, that protocol support may also apply to Federal agency bulletin boards and other information servers listed in the Green Pages. In such case, it is desirable that a Green Pages searcher be able to request a connection with a desired bulletin board or information server. 3.3.5 Common Characteristics a. The Directory will be able to accommodate specific descriptive information for the persons, offices and parties listed, to include the following: 1. The security mechanisms employed at that address. 2. Any public key(s) plus their credentials that are associated with the party/address. 3. Whether acknowledgements (receipts) to writers are generated automatically when messages are "opened" by that party. 4. The word processing/document handling software(s) used at that address. 5. The maximum message length that can be accommodated at that address, and any other limitations on types of information objects handled, message body parts, etc. 6. Electronic commerce/electronic data interchange capabilities supported. 7. The postal address associated with that e-mail address. 8. The facsimile telephone number associated with that e-mail address. 9. The voice telephone number associated with that e-mail address. b. The M.U.S.E. Directory will be populated only by the agency e-mail systems connected to the M.U.S.E. Non-Federal connected systems will not be allowed to add, change, or remove Directory entries. c. To the maximum extent possible, the M.U.S.E. Directory will be able to work in conjunction with agency system directories as a directory service agent, in accordance with Federal Information Processing Standards. It should be able to assist a message originator in obtaining a receiver's address by knowing only the agency, with or without office or geographic qualifier, and the name or alias of the intended receiver. d. The M.U.S.E. will collaborate with the designers of kiosks in the implementation of directory user agents for the kiosks. e. The Directory will incorporate capabilities commonly referred to as "query-by-mail," for all four parts of the Directory. f. To the maximum extent consistent with simplicity and ease of use, the Directory will employ standards-based mechanisms for search and retrieval. 3.3.6 Management and Maintenance The M.U.S.E. will be custodian of the information in its Directory. It will be responsible for the maintenance of the integrity of the information once it has been submitted by agencies, but it will not be responsible for the accuracy of the information. That responsibility will be borne by the submitting agencies. a. The M.U.S.E. will establish a Directory management arrangement designed to support its consolidated Directory for the entire Federal Government. b. At a minimum, it shall be possible to update the Directory once each day. Dynamic updating shall be employed to the extent economically and administratively feasible. c. Only the agency submitting a Directory entry may initiate a change or deletion for that entry. The M.U.S.E. management will employ authentication procedures for all Directory submissions. APPENDIX A - DEFINITION OF TERMS Agency. Any organizational or sub-organizational entity of any of the three Branches of the Federal Government. It might be a Bureau of an Executive Branch Department, an office within that Bureau, a U.S. District Court, a Congressional office, etc. Availability. Measurement of percentage of the time during which a writer can submit a message and have it received by the reader(s) within the specified speed of service time. Defense Message System. All hardware, software, procedures, personnel, and facilities required for electronic delivery of messages between organizations and individuals in the DOD. Federal/non-Federal. Anything that is administratively part of or a property of an agency. "Non-Federal" is anything that is not a part or property of an agency. Globally Unique Message Identifier. Message header information which can be used to unambiguously identify a particular message. Information which should be included, at a minimum, is address of the message originator and date/time stamp of origination. Message Delivery. When a message is transferred by the M.U.S.E. to another e-mail system. The other system may be an agency system with its own message store from which readers' user agents retrieve messages, or it may be a VAN or the Internet, et. al., which is providing intermediate message tranfer services for messages originating in the Federal Government. Message Looping. The process by which a message transits the same set of three or more message components repeatedly, such that it is not delivered to the intended destination. Message Receipt. When the intended recipient accesses a delivered message. Message Shuttling. The process by which a message transits the same two messaging components repeatedly, such that it is never delivered to the intended destination. Office. A generic term used in this document to indicate any Federal activity, installation, or location reachable with e-mail, which is identified by some name other than the name of an individual person. An "office" could be a military installation, hospital, national park or forest, or Coast Guard vessel. As used in this document, offices are contained within agencies. Originator. A human being or automated process that creates and sends a message. Program. A generic term used in the Federal Government to mean a set of related activities conducted by an agency to fulfill an aspect of its mission, pursuant to its statutory authority, or to provide administrative support to its mission activities. Reader. The human being or pre-programmed process which receives a message. For all practical purposes, the term is synonymous with "Receiver" and "Recipient." Traffic Volume. Number of message characters per fixed period of time. Writer. The human being or pre-programmed process which creates a message and initiates its transmission. For all practical purposes, the term is synonymous with "Originator."