Because of the nature of its business and the authoritative and complex nature of the Internal Revenue Manual (the IRM), many Internal Revenue Service (IRS) business units have found themselves developing ad-hoc Electronic Performance Support Systems (EPSS) to help navigate and apply its directives effectively. Unfortunately, this has led to static Web systems that are decoupled from the trusted source content (the IRM), and that cannot be leveraged or even discovered by other business units with potentially similar needs.
For these reasons, the IRS began to apply the standardization principles behind the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) to EPSS. In conjunction with the ADL Co-Lab and other industry participation, the IRS began the arduous task of applying a SCORM-like, object-oriented rigor to EPSS content development. Using these principles, the IRS defined several Performance Support Objects (SPOs), along with their corresponding metadata elements based on existing standards such as the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative.1
While the IRS demonstrated facilitated EPSS successfully using these structures and a collaborative authoring tool (an LCMS), electronic access to the IRM itself has emerged as the principle challenge and ultimate goal for enterprise-wide use at the IRS. Traditionally published in hardcopy, the IRM requires both structural and technological transformations for it to become a "trusted electronic source" for all IRS needs. This led the IRS to examine S1000D and how it might help facilitate the transformation of the IRM into a truly reusable and current electronic content source.
This paper will review the process followed by the IRS to decompose its Performance Support Objects using a SCORM-like approach, its successes in standardizing facilitated EPSS, its challenges in maintaining and leveraging the predominantly print-based trusted source (the IRM), and its goals for applying S1000D principles for transforming the IRM for use with EPSS, WBT, as well as traditional hardcopy.