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Page 5 of 9
The ECRMS project had started, according to McDevitt, with an initial draft of the Concept of Operations in 2002. This was reviewed and approved by the Office of Administration Counsel, which advises the President on all legal issues pertaining to White House administration; the White House Office of Records Management; White House Counsel, Harriet Miers; and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).
Subsequently the White House developed a statement of work to "complete a detailed system requirements specification, evaluate commercial off the shelf products and propose solutions that meet the government requirements."
Contractor Booz Allen recommended a combination of two commercial off-the-self products - the products were not named by McDevitt in his testimony -- to serve as the core of the ECRMS system. This approach, according to McDevitt, was presented to the White House Counsel, the White House Office of Records Management, and counsel in the Office of Administration (OA), which provides administration and support services for EOP components, all the agencies that are subject to the Freedom of Information Act in early 2004. With Unisys serving as the contractor for the final implementation phase, the White House undertook "systems configuration, testing and tuning."
Carlos Solari, who resigned in February 2005 to set up an IT security consulting firm in Shenandoah, Va. (he currently heads up Bell Labs Security Solutions Research Center at Alcatel-Lucent), has conceded that the implementation took longer than anticipated, in part because of extensive testing.
In early March 2006 standard operating procedures were developed; in July White House officials were given a final briefing on the search and retrieval capabilities of the ECMRS solution. The following month, McDevitt said, the project was "ready to go live." That never happened, however.
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