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E-Enterprise for the Environment

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About E-Enterprise for the Environment

Why E-Enterprise for the Environment?

E-Enterprise for the Environment (E-Enterprise) is a transformative 21st century strategy to reshape how government agencies deliver environmental protection. Through joint governance, the states, EPA, and tribes are collaboratively modernizing business processes and driving and sharing innovations across agencies and programs.  These changes will improve environmental results and enhance services to the regulated community and the public by making government more efficient and effective.   

The evolving relationship of the EPA, states, and tribes over more than four decades is reflected in environmental programs developed under statutes that have used different approaches and funding mechanisms to address varied environmental problems.  While these programs have achieved dramatic improvements in environmental quality during this period, challenges remain.  To tackle these complex environmental challenges, EPA, states and tribes have an opportunity to transform the way we implement these programs, as a shared responsibility, into an integrated national enterprise for environmental protection.

Core of E-Enterprise

The core purpose of E-Enterprise is to improve environmental protection by streamlining, reforming, and better integrating our programs. Higher performing programs will operate more efficiently and effectively to deliver positive environmental results.
 
With this streamlining in hand, we can use advances in information and monitoring technologies to deliver enhanced services for the regulated community, the public, and environmental agencies. The improvements of these services – exceptional process efficiencies, burden reduction, and transparency – can be realized only if technological modernization also incorporates the means for better program performance. Without streamlining and reforming our programs first, we risk that technology will automate unchanged, inefficient, fragmented processes.

 

Goals and Objectives

E-Enterprise is a strategy to drive systemic reform, enhance services, and thus improve environmental outcomes.  The E-Enterprise goals operationalize this strategy through a set of statements that describe what we seek to accomplish.

Goal 1:  Improve environmental protection through better program performance

E-Enterprise will improve the performance of current programs by developing new practices to implement them. This goal represents the ultimate marker by which success of E-Enterprise will be assessed:  Does it improve environmental protection?
 
Objectives:
  • Streamlining and modernizing business processes
  • Integrating E-Enterprise principles into applicable new policies and regulations
  • Developing and implementing new and more effective environmental management approaches
  • Promoting adoption and integration of advanced information and monitoring technologies.

Goal 2: Enhance services to stakeholders and agency partners

The E-Enterprise partnership will improve the quality of services delivered to the public and regulated entities and improve the efficiency of environmental agencies’ operations. E-Enterprise will reduce transaction costs and burden by modernizing our programs and developing innovative management approaches. This will include using shared services, converting from paper to more advanced electronic forms, streamlining program requirements, and applying advanced monitoring to streamline information collection. Enhanced services to the public focus on improving transparency.
 
Objectives:
  • Reducing transaction costs and burden for the regulated community
  • Reducing transaction costs for E-Enterprise agencies  
  • Improving transparency of environmental conditions, regulated community and government performance, and governmental administrative processes
  •  Improving the overall user experience for the public and regulated community

Goal 3: Operate our partnership as a transformative model for Joint Governance

Integrated environmental protection requires a new level and form of partnership, one which moves beyond simple coordination. We have begun by chartering an E-Enterprise Joint Governance body to establish strategic direction and policy, and to set priorities and oversee management of day to day joint work. Our framework of joint governance goes beyond our formal governance body to include the broad principle of encouraging early engagement and collaboration among EPA, states, and tribes for all our related work.

Objectives:
  • Jointly establish strategic direction and priorities for E-Enterprise
  • Working together to solve problems common across partners
  • Developing and promoting the use of innovative solutions
  • Establishing and using shared regulatory, technical, and policy tools