Agencies must shift to governing federal data by its domains
President Trump’s Management Agenda relies on a critical premise: The government must leverage its data as a strategic asset to deliver operational control, eliminate fraud and waste, and secure the nation. The administration has also signaled a commitment to empowering agency chief information officers to drive IT modernization and serve as the backbone of a government that efficiently serves the public.
However, modernizing systems is only half the battle. Authorities and accountabilities for information resources are too often confused between CIOs and their chief data officer counterparts — or worse, CDOs are not part of the conversation, stalling progress. For the President’s Management Agenda to succeed, CIOs must actively synchronize with and empower CDOs to aggressively align and advance their mandates under the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act. CIOs and CDOs must embrace a shift in how the government manages information, moving away from agency-centric ownership and toward domain-based federated data governance.
We have seen the success of CIO-led empowerment on mission domain information-sharing and data governance before. Following the tragic information-sharing and intelligence failures of Sept. 11, 2001, the federal government had an urgent mandate to pioneer a new, whole-of-government approach. In 2005, technology and program leaders from the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice collaborated to launch the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM). They worked closely with state and local law enforcement, public safety, and homeland security leaders through the attorney general’s Global Justice advisory committee.
These visionary leaders recognized that a common lexicon could break through the boundaries of individual agencies. Technology leaders in the White House and agencies built on and extended their success. A key innovation of NIEM — recently transitioned to an international OASIS standard called NIEMOpen — is its support for federated governance by mission or operational domains, such as justice, immigration, or military operations, rather than by the agencies that happen to collect or use the data.
The recent announcement of a strategic collaboration between the NIEM community and the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) community provides the catalyst needed to accelerate this domain-governed transformation. As the official release accurately diagnoses, “The world’s data needs are evolving faster than any single standard, ontology, or organization can keep pace with.” To overcome this, the new partnership pledges to deliver solutions that combine “NIEM’s exchange architecture with BFO’s semantic precision, ensuring that data is not only shared, but also understood, validated, and computable at scale across multiple domains.” Ultimately, this joint commitment will provide the necessary support for AI/ML systems that require high-fidelity, semantically coherent data.
How do empowered CDOs practically operationalize this new NIEM-BFO alliance? The answer lies in “testbed” approaches demonstrating open standards-based interoperability across information-sharing ecosystems. Instead of attempting massive, top-down overhauls, CDOs must work backward from specific, governance-prioritized joint use cases. By identifying and quickly addressing common operational needs, agencies can use collaborative testbeds to develop, test, and demonstrate interoperability using open standards.
We have already seen this model succeed. The Geo4NIEM initiative — a collaborative testbed between the DHS, the Department of Defense, and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) — proved that agencies could seamlessly embed geospatial standards directly into NIEM exchanges. By testing specific incident-management use cases, and working in OGC’s industry-led testbed, Geo4NIEM demonstrated “full-round tripping” of data, allowing agencies to map and track geospatial intelligence dynamically without being locked into proprietary vendor solutions.
While Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA) is not the only application for this technology, it serves as a current and useful starting point for the next generation of testbeds integrating NIEM and BFO. MDA requires the rapid inter-agency fusion of data regarding vessels, people, cargo, and navigable waterways. Today, this challenge is infinitely more complex due to overlapping airspace and maritime operations, including the rapid proliferation of drones and automated vehicles.
Recent solicitations highlight an opportunity to deploy this testbed approach. U.S. Customs and Border Protection recently issued requests for information seeking technologies for Level III Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems and Persistent Wide-Area Air Surveillance (PWAAS) to secure our borders against aerial threats. DHS Science and Technology is advancing Air, Land, and Maritime Domain Awareness (ALMDA) Initiatives, and the Coast Guard has issued an RFI for Maritime Domain Awareness. As DHS and its components evaluate new domain awareness networks and possible solutions, follow-on requests for proposals serve as an ideal vehicle to mandate standards integration and ensure DHS benefits from its past investments.
DHS, CBP, and Coast Guard can demand that new solutions leverage standards-based ontologies, so that resulting knowledge graphs support interoperable entity resolution. Standards jointly governed by NIEMOpen and BFO can meet the requirement. NIEMOpen’s governance includes national law enforcement, which would go toward supporting further interoperability with high-value, high-priority public safety, counter-narcotics, and law enforcement counterdrone use cases. Such an approach would also promote interoperability with DOD’s efforts through the National Maritime Domain Awareness Plan.
The standards agreements and the technology to achieve this exist today, but they alone cannot overcome organizational resistance. Program and agency incentives always lean toward greenfield, siloed, “not invented here” mindsets rather than dealing with the overhead of common solutions, even when they objectively lower cost and risk, and expand interoperability. However, the pathways are proven, anchored in existing standards organizations, and leverage past investments. The success of this ecosystem relies on federal CIOs and technology leaders accepting the logic of domain vs. agency governance, synchronizing investments in data infrastructure, integrating and backing their CDOs, and doing the work of collaborative governance on interoperability via standards organizations.
By empowering CDOs to embrace NIEMOpen’s domain-based governance, actively supporting its new collaboration with BFO, and utilizing testbeds to prove joint use cases, agency leaders can transform disjointed records into an intelligent, unified operating picture. This proposition extends across governmentwide information-sharing challenges faced by agency CIOs and technology leaders. The described approach is how we secure our borders, address threats to national and homeland security, broadly advance interoperable public services, and protect the taxpayer. It is how we lower risk and cost to deliver on the promise of the President’s Management Agenda.
Kshemendra Paul is a senior fellow at the Data Foundation and a fellow at the National Academy of Public Administration. He’s served in a variety of federal agencies and the White House in roles such as assistant inspector general, governmentwide lead for information sharing, federal chief architect, program manager, and chief data officer.
