agency information exchange functional standards evaluation

SUMMARIES OF THE AGENCIES REPORTING NO USE OF NIEM
Department of Education (ED), through the Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA), identified no gaps
in their information exchanges. FSA currently uses a data exchange standard that was developed jointly
with the education community, in association with the Postsecondary Electronic Standards Council
(PESC), and there is no current performance gap with this exchange.
National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) was unable to identify any requirements for
cross-boundary information exchange, at this time, that would fall under the purview of NIEM.
Integration points between the Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) Framework and NIEM will
need to be coordinated when the CUI Framework is finalized.
Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) exchange of data with external entities is document-based or
takes the form of mutually accessible databases. NRC is in the process of evaluating areas of opportunity
for automated data exchange that would support machine-readable formats. No alternative approaches
have been identified.
B. DATA STANDARDS FRAMEWORKS
Our challenges today are often boundary-spanning: they cut across sectors, organizations and units, and
require the collaboration of governments, industry, and citizens. Some challenges are long-standing,
against which little progress has been made; others are new and arise on Internet-enabled networks.
These challenges move quickly and demand anticipation, agile response, and leadership at all levels of
organization, from corporals to generals, clerks to managers to chief executive officers.
In a world where problems and opportunities cut horizontally across the assets arrayed against them, our
industrial age organizations tend to be vertical and ill-suited to the task. We are caught between the era
of paper-driven systems and that of the digital era. We base many of our decisions on the rules of the
paper world, not the rules of the digital world. We bound the latitude of workers in ways that fetter the
discretion, inventiveness and innovation required for today’s complex challenges. The performance of
organizations in shared mission efforts is difficult to parse, and accountabilities hard to ascribe. Yet there
is no longer money simply to throw at problems without the promise of results.
The United States, for example, fragments health and human service programs, from Medicaid to
veterans’ services, many administered through the states, and costing $420 billion annually. Our stovepiped
systems are unable to interoperate. At the enterprise level, systems cannot provide a common
operating picture of all providers and services that may be arrayed around a particular beneficiary across
all those programs – or to take an enterprise view of what works.
Where the mergers of platforms, people and organizations are possible, they have proven slow, costly,
unpredictable, and difficult to wage. However, standards for information sharing and exchange, and
governance across shared mission enterprises comprise of boundary-spanning solutions that can achieve
many of the same effects in less time, at lower cost, and with the promise of improved performance.
Such approaches are just right for the networked age: quick, light, and providing consistency across
multiple views and inputs.
• Standards reduce complexity. Customs and Border Protection and the Department of
Homeland Security, for example, have over one thousand point to point connections
between their legacy systems. By using standards, they now have over 100 reusable
information exchanges. This constitutes a move from a collection of point to point
12