It's very exciting to be here today and have the opportunity to announce a whole new way for the Enforcement Division to collaborate, a platform all of you are going to take in directions we can't even imagine.
The Enforcement Division has been built on the collaborative hard work of incredibly talented securities litigators. But Irv Pollack and Stan Sporkin didn't have anything like this. Now, we're going to be able to take collaboration to the next level with this wonderful platform.
When the Division was founded 35 years ago, collaboration was every bit as important as it is today. But it meant finding someone, hopefully in their office, or reaching them on their landline phone. And if they couldn't remember what it was about what they were working on that you were interested in, that meant looking it up in a file folder somewhere.
That gave way to mobile phones and voice mail, where the chance of reaching someone in real time — or at least eventually — improved markedly. And we've had a lot of great milestones since the widespread integration of PCs, including the Case Activity Tracking System (CATS), which was the first real step toward an integrated case management system, and generated some basic summary reports.
We're now on the threshold of an entirely new breakthrough that will let SEC professionals from Headquarters and every one of our regional offices get immediate access to what's going on in Enforcement in real time.
Now, our vision for the Hub is a very broad and ambitious one. It's about empowerment. And whereas in the past the possibilities for collaboration were very much limited by who was down the hallway from you, and what limited information was in CATS, today that vision is very much expanding. The Hub will offer many new possibilities for sharing information.
The Hub is also a wonderful tool to help each staff member manage their own caseload. It will also be a great way for individual attorneys and professionals to interface with CATS and the more than 30,000 investigations and inquiries that it holds. The Hub will also be your gateway to everything in the Division's Testimony Tracking System, in the Name Relationship Search Index (NRSI) and in Phoenix.
For the first time, the Hub will provide Enforcement managers with real-time access to data that can help them look at the entire program and its consistency across regions and case types.
And the Hub will reduce many of the administrative reporting burdens on all of us.
This morning's launch makes the home office the twelfth and final office to be Hub-enabled. I am happy to report that reviews from users in all 11 regional offices have been uniformly positive.
Of course, like any great advance, this system is the result of a team effort.
The Enforcement Hub team was led by Walter Ricciardi, flanked most notably by Mark Velsko, who designed the original Boston office prototype, and Donna Norman. We've also had outstanding help from Enforcement IT staff Greg Cobert, Scott Plimpton and Art Powell. And thank you to more than 80 focus group members representing all 12 offices — and to Corey Booth and Srini Bangerable's capable team of Jonathan Karp and Tanya Bass from the Office of Information Technology.
And now I'd like to turn the microphone over to Donna and Mark, so we can take a closer look at the Hub.