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GCN Home > 09/15/03 issue

E-forms team finds power partners

By Patricia Daukantas, GCN Staff

Rick Rogers, chief executive officer of Fenestra Technologies Corp., has been digitizing Census Bureau projects for more than a decade.

His Germantown, Md., company developed the Generalized Instrument Design System to publish print and electronic forms for the bureau’s most recent economic census [GCN, April 1, 2002, Page 43]. Since March, Rogers has headed a government-industry team called the E-Forms for E-Government pilot, which is evaluating the latest standards for publishing electronic forms.

Before founding Fenestra in 1996, Rogers directed software development at Washington Publishing Group of Gaithersburg, Md. There he managed the first two full-scale, production-quality electronic surveys for Census. He started his career as a database manager with the Data Interchange Standards Association of Alexandria, Va.

Rogers holds a bachelor’s degree in history from Carleton College. He spent a semester at Keble College in Oxford, England.

His full name is Roy S. Rogers IV after his great-grandfather, a dentist in Hillsboro, Ohio. In 1937, a young performer from the nearby town of Duck Run took the name of his childhood dentist as a stage name and became famous as Roy Rogers, the singing cowboy.

GCN associate editor Patricia Daukantas interviewed Rogers by telephone.

GCN: What progress have you made on the E-Forms for E-Government Pilot?

ROGERS: Our goals are to identify best practices and key metrics. The e-forms process has to support the Government Paperwork Elimination Act, the President’s Management Agenda and the Performance Reference Model.

We’re wrapping up the first phase and will publish an interim report soon. The first phase focused on Extensible Markup Language Schema, security and establishing a business case for using e-forms.

One of the ideas behind the Performance Reference Model is that performance needs to be measured. We’re establishing metrics that can demonstrate success in an e-forms project, such as reducing the reporting burden and saving on processing electronic and paper forms.

GCN: How did you choose the sample forms listed on the pilot team’s Web site, at ww.fenestra.com/eforms?