For federal agencies, challenges abound in knowing how to pick a data governance tool that includes a data catalog and a workflow engine for automating appropriate stewardship activities and enabling governance processes. Come and hear how one federal agency was able to select, understand, install, and configure a tool in less than a year, and achieve an initial operating capability for every program office soon thereafter, all on a small budget and with a small dedicated team of data management professionals. Hear about how the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission was able to:

• Find a user-oriented cloud SaaS solution with robust connectors capable of harvesting technical metadata from source data stores for a reasonable price through solid market research, well-structured demos, and practical evaluation criteria.
• Avoid common pitfalls in data cataloging implementation, particularly by focusing on an ability to establish, grow, and steward the data asset inventory from a business perspective through a highly flexible metamodel that is easy to modify, test, and deploy – understanding the difference between your organization's logical and physical data layers.
• Understand the cloud data platform environment and the need for a "central nervous system" in the data governance tool using APIs, active metadata, and workflow triggers to ensure a robust circuitry of cloud data governance activities across data lakes, analytic engines like Databricks and Synapse, and end-user tools like PowerBI and Posit.
• Orient the establishment of the new tool and the activation of users toward a data stewardship maturation program as the foundation of a major culture shift around how regulatory mission practitioners think about data, describe and contextualize it, and share it in a way that saves staff time for more mission-focused work capacity.
• Lastly, accelerate modernizations across operational systems, submissions and filings from the public, and formats and context of collected information that better situates the agency for task automation, AI-enhanced information analysis, and additional operational efficiencies and cost-savings.

While still only 2 years into the data governance tool journey, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's game plan is clear and gaining momentum for transforming our organizational data culture, democratizing data access and analytical power for our internal staff, delivering regulatory outcomes that support the US energy sector, and even delivering more relevant and insightful data to the public. And, we are here to tell you, "You can do it too."

Speaker: Doug Reimel

Doug Reimel is an enterprise data architect working to organize, understand, share, and leverage data as an asset to commercial and government organizations for more than 25 years. Envisioned and formulated an authoritative and trusted data methodology 12 years ago for the Department of Homeland Security, architected and built a DHS HQ analytics engine ("DHS Management Cube"), and now helping to democratize data for the regulatory practitioners at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. He is a multiple-time award winner of the DHS "Cross-Management Collaboration Award" and a Top 10 finalist for the ACT-IAC "Igniting Innovation Award."