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Celebrating 25 Years

GCN Home > 03/08/04 issue

Gimme Shelter

By William Jackson, GCN Staff

Web app finds homes for military recruiters before they arrive

Personnel at 1,400 military recruiting centers sometimes live far from the nearest Army, Navy or Air Force base.

“It lets our recruiters be a part of the community where they are working,” said John Curry, leased housing program manager for the Navy Recruiting Command. But living off-base can make housing difficult to find.

In high-rent areas, the services absorb the extra cost of off-base housing through the Government Leased Housing program. About 450 recruiters with families and another 95 singles—about 10 percent of the Navy’s recruiting force—have found housing through the program. Until 2002, it was a time-consuming paper process.

“At best, to get a sailor in a house took a month to three months,” Curry said.

Now a browser application has cut the delay by automating the application and approval process. “A sailor can apply online, the application will go to all the appropriate links for funding and we can get it to the Corps of Engineers in hours. It’s pretty slick,” Curry said.

The Army Corps of Engineers is the leasing agent for the Army and Air Force, and it handles leased housing transactions for all recruiting commands, including the Navy. The corps can have funding approval and a selection of homes ready for inspection by the time a recruiter arrives in town.

No training needed

The system required no recruiter training, said Todd Nevin, president of Momentum Systems Inc. of Arlington, Va., the developer. “It creates a virtual community” of individual recruiters, their commands and the Corps of Engineers, he said. The corps hosts the application at its Vicksburg, Miss., data center, and Momentum manages it remotely.

The foundation is the LiveLink document management system from Open Text Corp. of Waterloo, Ontario. LiveLink has a browser front end with workflow management and records management at the back end. It can open and manage documents in most formats. When a housing application is submitted online, LiveLink routes it to the appropriate command for approval, then to the appropriate Corps of Engineers district for execution.

More news on related topics: E-Government, IT in Action