Enterprise Data Sharing Plan

Increased access to data will provide improved decision making and enhanced transparency.

Introduction:

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) collects a wide range of data from a variety of sources in order to complete its mission and effectively regulate communications for the United States.  The data exists in customized server-based relational databases built to support specific uses, and the applications have evolved over the years.

The FCC has nearly 100 applications built on Sybase, Oracle, SQL Server, MS Access, and more recently, open source products including PostgreSQL and MySQL.  Getting access to each database requires approval from application owners, and the database administrator granting access privileges.  Combining data from multiple databases is non-trivial, especially if it is stored in different database platforms.  This typically involves extracting data from the source databases, transforming as necessary to meet the use case, and loading to another database.  These custom datasets typically cannot be re-used to solve a different business problem because they are created with data filters appropriate to the original problem.

The FCC needed a plan to establish enterprise data sharing in order to provide Analysts with access to the data needed to improve decision making and increase transparency for stakeholders.

Solution:

Due to its Data Intelligence expertise, Computech was contracted by the FCC to develop an enterprise data sharing plan.  Enterprise Data Sharing is defined as an approach and process to architecting, prototyping, and implementing systems that makes data, data structure, and data validation increasingly platform and application independent and easily transportable between systems and applications.

To start the process, Computech met with the FCC’s Chief Data Officer (CDO) and other key stakeholders to understand their vision and develop a plan that outlines the approach and methodology for this task.  This direction helped Computech create a detailed action plan to realize FCC’s vision for Data Sharing.  The plan covered the team structure for Data Sharing, how the team will operate with the existing teams, processes, security, and how to create a data-driven analytics culture at the FCC.  We also identified a list of specific projects that will lay down the data sharing infrastructure a plank at a time, make FCC more data-driven, and make it very easy for FCC Analysts to use the data in its databases.

The Data Sharing Team’s mission is to build reusable data assets and analysis techniques, create a thriving community of data scientists, and ultimately, make it painless for Analysts to use data.

In the first month the team will undertake a well-defined project to implement some of these ideas.  In 3-6 months, the FCC will be more data-dependent, and will have reduced (if not eliminated) the barriers to using data for analysis.  In the long run, the FCC will be prepared to undertake more complex problems like Identity Management, using unstructured data locked-up in text documents that are not machine analyzable, and providing a data interchange hub.

Computech’s proposed plan offers the FCC the following benefits:

  • Publishing application-specific data to the entire enterprise highlights inconsistencies and usability issues, a first step to improving data quality and making the data useful.
  • Clean data that is relevant at the Commission-level, not just at the application-level, increases the FCC’s transparency, improves user experiences, and increases citizen engagement.
  • Automation brings consistency to our work, reduces dependence on specific individuals, and reduces cost.  Scarce resources can then be allocated to more rewarding and sophisticated analysis.

In collaboration with the FCC, Computech developed a plan for the following strategy:

  1. Simplify data access – 3 Spheres of Data: Private, Enterprise, and Public
  2. Create analyst-oriented data marts & Master Data Management
  3. Add a data perspective to the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC)
  4. Simplify connecting to external data sources – Linked Open Data

Notable Results:

The results achieved from implementation of the Enterprise Data Sharing Plan will be increased access to data, improved data management and added transparency. As an added note, in June 2010 the FCC launched the Data Innovation Initiative to “modernize and streamline how it collects, uses, and disseminates data.” Enterprise Data Sharing is a key piece to realizing this vision.