Wednesday, November 2, 2011

DHS Updates CSAT Registration Manual

Yesterday the folks at the DHS Infrastructure Security Compliance Division (ISCD) updated their web page for the CSAT registration process. The description for the CSAT User Registration User Guide changed from “(PDF, 31 pages - 2.22 MB)” to “(PDF, 31 pages - 1.4 MB)”; this indicated a change in that manual. Sure enough, the link now takes you to version 5.1 of the manual dated October 2011.

As you would expect from a change in version numbers from ‘5.0’ to ‘5.1’ the change in the manual is rather small. On page 17 of the manual (page 14 on the .PDF viewer page number; I hate it when document preparers don’t take the effort to link actual document page numbers to .PDF page numbers) the new version removes the following language from the end of paragraph 3 in the discussion about verifying facility location on the Google Maps web site.

“Google Maps converts the decimal representation of the latitude and longitude coordinates to degrees, minutes, and seconds; the decimal representation is shown in the Search Box. Do NOT change the latitude and longitude coordinates to decimal representation in the Facility Information box in the CSAT User Registration application.”

I would assume that this means that it doesn’t make a hill of beans difference if you use the ‘decimal’ or the conventional (old style) representation of the facility latitude and longitude. Since they are both methods of expressing the same information, I should hope that the folks at ISCD should be able to convert back and forth between them. Or, rather, they should be able to use the Google Map function that does the same.

BTW: ISCD is still refusing to provide management of change documentation on their manuals. I had to do a line-by-line comparison of the two manuals to find this change. There used to be a management of change blurb at the beginning of these CSAT manuals describing the changes in versions of the manuals. It was a GIANT DECREASE in department professionalism when the practice was discontinued.

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