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GCN Home > 11/08/04 issue

OMB releases much-anticipated data model

By Jason Miller, GCN Staff

Interior pilot proves value of uniform data standards

The Interior Department’s Recreation One-Stop e-government project hit a wall: Federal and state government partners working on the project could not agree on what data to include and share for making reservations at state and national parks. The disagreement seemed bound to hamper development of Recreation One-Stop.

Then Suzanne Acar and her enterprise architecture team lent a hand.

Acar, Interior’s data architect, broke down the data so that project participants could understand what information would be shared and where it belonged within each subfunction of the recreation line of business. Helping the states better understand the data convinced them that the project was headed in the right direction, Acar said.

Her work highlights the potential benefits of the Office of Management and Budget’s new Data Reference Model, the fifth and final piece to the Federal Enterprise Architecture. OMB just released the DRM for governmentwide use.

The DRM has been in the works for more than 18 months and is widely considered the key to making use of the FEA viable. But it also has been the most difficult model to develop, and its arrival is months later than OMB expected. Karen Evans, OMB’s administrator for IT and e-government, said at a hearing in June that the model would be out in July.

The DRM helps promote common identification, use and appropriate sharing of data across the government in three areas: categorization, exchange and structure.

“Agencies that define and categorize their data using a common approach can identify IT applications that meet user requirements prior to proposing new IT investments,” the DRM noted. “Agencies that exchange their data in a common structure increase the likelihood that other agencies can re-use the IT investment as a shared service within their own architectures.”

Agency officials said they are eager to get their hands on the model.

“We believe the chosen path is a workable approach provided it focuses on the needs of information exchange, and not try to set data storage structures and formats,” said John Sullivan, chief architect for the Environmental Protection Agency. “Volume 1 [of the DRM] is critical because there is so much interest in how data is classified and shared. I expect there will be a lot of discussion about the DRM language and its terminology.”

More news on related topics: E-Government, Management, New Products / Technology, IT Management, State & Local



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