24   IASSIST Quarterly  2014

IASSIST QuarterlyIASSIST Quarterly

Abstract
Data play a critical role in fulfilling the Federal 
Reserve Board’s mission across a broad range of 
functions, including monetary policy, financial 
stability, supervision, consumer protection, and 
economic research. The current data environment 
was designed to allow the various business functions 
to manage relatively small and predictable data sets 
that required limited sharing across departments or 
functions, effectively creating business-based silos. The 
Office of the Chief Data Officer was created in May 
2013 to address the data needs of the Board, post-
financial crisis, with an enterprise focus and a clear 
set of mandates to enhance data governance, data 
management, and data integration. The OCDO started 
operations with a small staff of data management 
professionals who traditionally supported the research 
function and now must shift gears to provide data 
services to a broader base of users and a wider range 
of analytical work. New infrastructures, programs, 
processes and staffing are being developed and 
deployed to ensure that data needs across the lifecycle 
are met and that a variety of analytical approaches can 
be supported.

Keywords: Research, data management, governance, 
dissemination

Introduction
Data are the lifeblood of the Board of Governors, 
and the Federal Reserve System has always been a 
data-driven organization. Data play a critical role in 
fulfilling the Board’s mission across a broad range of 
functions, including financial stability, monetary policy, 
supervision, consumer protection, and economic 
research. As the Board’s mandate has expanded in 

the wake of the financial crisis and the passage of the 
Dodd-Frank Act, so has the need for an optimized 
data environment to meet the breadth and depth 
of analytical and supervisory challenges the Board 
is addressing.
The Office of the Chief Data Officer (OCDO) was 
created in May 2013 through the 2012-2015 Strategic 
Framework to address major data challenges at the 
Board, to implement a data governance framework, 
to improve data management operations cross 
all divisions and Board-delegated functions, and 
to strengthen the Board’s information sharing 
environment to optimize the investment in data assets.  
There are a variety of projects in three strategic areas 
that must be undertaken to shore up the foundation 
of our data management operations and position the 
OCDO to provide the strategic thought leadership 
around data management and governance for which it 
was created. 

Inventory and metadata
Critical to the Board’s vision for improved data 
optimization is knowledge of the body of data and 
content within the Board and across the System.  
More importantly, we need knowledge not just that 
data exist, but we need an understanding of their 
relationship to the organizational mission as well as the 
internal functions, services, and processes. This includes 
more complete and better-documented knowledge 
of information flows, system interconnections, and 
data security classifications. The overarching vision 
of the OCDO enterprise data inventory program is to 
provide the visibility and knowledge of data and their 
relationship to the people, processes and technology 
environment in order to support critical data needs 
and improve data management in a dynamic and 

Building an Enterprise 
Data Service at the 
Federal Reserve Board   

by San Cannon1 



IASSIST Quarterly  2014   25

IASSIST Quarterly

complex ecosystem.  Existing System data—collected, contracted, 
and created—have not been systemically or strategically cataloged.  
Moreover, data that have been cataloged have not been cataloged 
consistently as there are no System-wide standards for doing so. 
The first stage of the Enterprise Data Inventory (EDI) project was 
recently completed, identifying necessary metadata elements 
for capturing relevant information about our data assets. These 
elements describe physical and logical datasets, roles and 
responsibilities of the individuals that interact with the data, the 
business processes and functions that include those data and the 
applications and technologies where the data reside.  Acquisition 
of a repository to hold these elements and a user interface to make 
things easy to find are part of the next project steps.

Data management
Data management is the business function that develops and 
executes plans, policies, practices, and projects that acquire, 
control, protect, deliver, and enhance the value of data. The Board’s 
data reside in a number of operational and analytical systems 
distributed across the Board and System, in varying states of 
modernization. There are industrial-strength systems that collect 
and manage data for some departments using time-proven 
methods and relational database technologies.  In other areas, 
there are quick queries to collect data from financial institutions or 
other government agencies via spreadsheets that are stored on file 
shares.  Other departments are developing data warehouses and 
using new “big data” storage technologies.  All these repositories 
meet local and departmental needs but none was developed 
with the goal of broader access as a key requirement. There has 
been a pressing increase in the post-crisis needs of the Board to 
manage a much wider variety of data types across a multitude 
of data management platforms and to do a better job of sharing 
those data regardless of their storage location or technology.  
There have been suggestions in the past that a single enterprise 
data warehouse would solve all our storage and sharing problems.  
However, we have determined that there is no one-size-fits-all 
technology solution to the wide variety and volumes of data that 
the Board is now responsible for managing. We are engaging in 
fundamental work will that look at appropriately matching data 
management technologies with data assets. 

The OCDO thinks strategically how to best manage the challenges 
facing data operations across the Board.  As an enterprise service 
provider, it also needs to build a strong foundation for its own 
data management operations.  The goal is to provide scalable 
data management services to the Board, and the System where 
appropriate, that can meet the increasing data capacity demands 
of the organization.  The current staff have historically provided 
service primarily to the research community at the Board only, 
but now need to manage data for and disseminate data to other 
departments with very different business models.  The legacy 
systems for doing the basic intake and output will not scale to 
support the entire enterprise and a the OCDO has engaged 
consultants to best determine the technologies and work flow 
needed for this new level of service is well underway.

Data governance 
Data governance is a core part of the OCDO’s mission. Data 
governance is the exercise of authority, control, and shared 
decision-making (planning, monitoring, and enforcement) over 
the management of data assets. Data governance supplies the 
discipline to deal with both the predictable and unpredictable 
nature of new data acquisition and data distribution across the 

organization. Today, data governance activities occur in business 
lines with little or no formal coordination across the Board and 
across Board-delegated functions. Little of this work is automated, 
and even then generally not beyond the use of SharePoint sites as 
document repositories.

The OCDO will facilitate a variety of data governance activities 
through its Data Governance Program (DGP). The DGP serves as a 
conduit for coordination, communication, and decision-making 
across and within business lines and departments within the Board.  
The DGP has responsibility for developing the body of policies, 
processes, standards, and metrics; communicating progress 
and informing the organization about ongoing and completed 
activities; and, completing specific DGP actions, deliverables and 
activities.   

Once foundational projects in these functional areas are underway, 
the Board will be better positioned to undertake more strategic 
work to provide discovery services.  To improve the Board’s ability 
to find, layer, and explore a wide variety of data in unique ways 
is an important goal to better serve the Board’s mission critical 
work which is more multi-disciplinary and cross-functional than 
it has ever been. We are planning work that supports the notion 
of discovery through the development of an enterprise-wide 
information architecture that shows the conceptual and logical 
relationships between different types of data regardless of the 
technology or application that supports the data.  This includes 
the development of subject area models and taxonomies as well 
as the development of analytics, visualizations and knowledge 
management services. Some of this has been done at the 
departmental level in the past but the OCDO focus is to provide 
such services for data users across the Board. 
Additional services

Other services will be needed to support the growing scope 
of work for an enterprise data service.  The creation of a formal 
information architecture practice will lay the foundation for more 
complete data modeling and documentation of the logical 
and conceptual relationships between data assets.  Business 
analysts will help map business processes and evaluate workflow 
efficiencies.  Formal change management and communication will 
help staff to better understand what the OCDO can do for them, 
rather than worrying about what the Office is trying to do to them.  
Project management and training complete the service portfolio 
and will help keep work moving forward and users better informed 
about what data we have and how it can or should be used.

Conclusion
While the Federal Reserve Board is midway through the strategic 
plan that brought centralized data management and governance 
into being, the work will extend far beyond this strategic plan 
and will likely be an important theme in the next plan.  When 
fully staffed at just under 50 staff members, the Office of the Chief 
Data Officer will have to be efficient, effective, collaborative and 
communicative to be able to serve as an enterprise service and 
work effectively in an institution with long standing business line 
traditions and work flows.

NOTES
1.San Cannon, Deputy Chief Data Officer, Federal Reserve Board, 

Washington, D.C. 20551 sandra.a.cannon@frb.gov

1.San
mailto:sandra.a.cannon@frb.gov