5/5/2006
White Paper
U. S Department of Agriculture
Electronic Official Personnel Folder (e-OPF)
Introduction – The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) is implementing several systems
across Government that’s intended to improve the management of human capital. One of these
systems is the e-OPF. The e-OPF replaces the current paper based folder with an electronic
folder containing each employee’s personnel records. Information on e-OPF can be found on the
OPM web site, http://www.opm.gov/egov/ehri_overview.asp .
This concept of operations paper is intended to outline the basic concepts of the e-OPF and its
components.
Benefits – e-OPF improves the ability of the Government to provide personnel services in
many ways including:
Access – Employees who are not co-located with the personnel office that maintains
their paper based OPF have little or no access to the documents in their folder. In many
cases an employee never reviews the content of his or her folder until retirement. If
errors have occurred and critical documents have not been properly filed early in a
person’s career, they are much more difficult to correct 10, 20 or 30 years after the fact.
e-OPF provides employee access any time and any place via a secure internet site.
Security/Continuity of Operations – The current paper based folder is a “single point
of failure.” A folder can be lost. A fire or natural disaster can destroy hundreds or
thousands of folders. There is no back up. As an electronic database, e-OPF allows
every employee’s documentation to be backed up and securely stored at a remote site.
The employment record for each employee can be restored if a disaster occurs.
Efficiency of Operations – The current system requires documents such as a
“Notification of Personnel Action” to be printed. One copy gets filed and one copy gets
mailed to the employee. For example, the annual pay adjustment for agency “X” in
January produces approximately 14,000 documents that must be