June SDWIS Prime Update
by Alan Roberson, Executive Director, ASDWA
to State Drinking Water Administrators
Part 1:
Good Morning State Administrators, this is the June Monthly SDWIS Prime Update, and the July update will likely be substantive as that update will be after the ASDWA/EPA Data Management Users Conference (DMUC) on July 9-12. We anticipate lots of detailed information transfer and lots of lively discussions at DMUC.
June has been a busy month for SDWIS Prime, beyond finalizing the DMUC agenda and handouts. A series of three pre-conference webinars were held on June 19th, 20th, and 28th and archived recordings of these webcasts are available for viewing at any time in the SDWIS Video Library of ASDWA.org. These webinars were at a “101” level to bring any new staff IT staff up to a certain level of knowledge on SDWIS Prime so that any face-to-face discussions at DMUC would get down into the nitty-gritty.
Another two-part survey was sent out a couple of weeks ago – the SDWIS Prime Transition Survey and Interfacing Applications Data Collection Tool (note that log-in is required). Besides going out to the states, this survey was sent to the EPA Regions and to ECOS’ state data contacts (more about our work with ECOS below). The intent of this survey was to collect information prior to DMUC to better inform our face-to-face discussions there.
ASDWA and ECOS are continuing to closely collaborate on SDWIS Prime, by leveraging ECOS’ ongoing work through their E-Enterprise Community Inventory Platform. This platform could be used to inventory tools and interfacing application solutions between various states during the transition to SDWIS Prime. A Shared Services Group (ASDWA, ECOS and EPA staff and some of ECOS’ state data contacts) has been established to optimize the leveraging of this platform.
If you want to get a flavor of the DMUC discussions but are unable to attend, most of the DMUC will be broadcast over the web. Anthony DeRosa will be sending out log-in information next week to the Administrators and data management contacts for these broadcasts.
Pilot testing for SDWIS Prime is still scheduled for the fall of 2018 and the release of the initial version of SDWIS Prime to all states and EPA Regions in early 2019. The transition support for SDWIS Prime in 2019 and 2020 during this transition is an ongoing issue. At this point, the clock for EPA’s one-year support for the transition for the states will start after the initial release version is fully tested and available to all state to adopt. Whether EPA will provide support beyond that first year is still not clear at this point.
Part 2 (from EPA) of the June SDWIS Prime update is below as this will help clarify some future expectations:
In May, EPA conveyed on the All Things SDWIS call the shift in remaining development focus for the September Prime release, from a module by module approach for User Interface development, to a Business Rules Engine (BRE) test case approach. In this approach, functionality for implementing the rules in the BRE is the primary development driver for the User Interface (UI).
EPA conveyed that the post-September development emphasis will include completing API web services and publishing the Prime UI code, both of which are oriented towards enabling primacy agencies to start using Prime sooner and with greater flexibility. The Shared Services Group (consisting of ECOS and ASDWA and EPA staff and some ECOS state data contacts) will help with coordination of resources for primacy agencies’ utilization of web services and the published Prime UI code.
Alan
