IMPLEMENTING A PERSONNEL SECURITY INFORMATION SYSTEM TO ENHANCE PERSONNEL RELIABILITY AND MINIMIZE INSIDER THREAT

The Department of Energy, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and other federal and state agencies are dramatically increasing their requirements for applicant screening, certification and ongoing employee assessment. The DoE's new Personal Security Assurance Program (PSAP) and NRC's Access Authorization Rule and Fitness-for- Duty program are examples. These personnel security and reliability programs make it difficult for large organizations to manually process, integrate and manage all the required information. This is due, primarily, to the inordinate amount of personnel data and the administrative complexity associated with the assessment process. Even in a straightforward case, Personnel, Security, Safety and Medical Departments must be involved in data collection, analysis and assessment. At the 1988 and 1989 INMM annual meetings, the author presented several concepts, designs and automated solutions related to this data management challenge. Since that time, an operational system, the FLOW GEMINI Personnel Security Information System (PERSIS), has been developed and implemented at a major construction and engineering firm that supplies personnel to nuclear power utilities. The system addresses the company's data collection, analysis and assessment needs by marrying sophisticated data base management and artificial intelligence techniques -- resulting in a comprehensive decision support system that ensures personnel reliability and regulatory compliance. This paper is a case study of this company's adoption and use of a software system to systematically tackle personnel security and reliability issues within their organization.