Guerrilla Enterprise Data Management at the US Forest Service

The US Forest Service is highly autonomous, with most data collected and managed in geographically distributed forests and grasslands. In 2006, with little staff confidence in agency data and limited public data sharing, the agency developed a roadmap for Enterprise Reporting and Analysis to improve information sharing, quality, and data management efficiency. The outcome was an Enterprise Data Warehouse project with a small budget and no dedicated staff. This presentation will describe creative approaches used by the EDW Team to overcome bureaucratic hurdles and entrenched attitudes towards enterprise initiatives to successfully deploy the EDW and grow a user community. These include:

Reinvigorated a dormant data governance body to provide content review
Applied agency GIS data standards and standard reference data to achieve integration
Integrated dimensional modeling with spatial data for spatial business intelligence reporting
Embraced requirements for Open Data publication and developed web map services for distributing data internally and externally
Solicited volunteer participation from other programs and relied on a revolving door of staff on detail

Dave Green currently manages the Forest Service Enterprise Data Warehouse that provides trusted data to agency programs and the public and business intelligence capabilities to agency users. He has worked for the agency for 30 years, for a long time on the Nez Perce National Forest in north central Idaho, developing data structures, data, and information products for resource specialists in silviculture, watershed, wildlife, soils, archaeology, recreation, engineering, botany and fire. He has worked in data architecture and data management for the Chief Information Office for the last 10 years. His particular interests are data standards for geospatial data and providing information to users of all sorts. He has a BS in Resource Conservation and Geology from the University of Montana and an MS in Forest Soils from the University of Minnesota. When not on the phone or reading e-mail, Dave enjoys hiking, biking, and cross-country skiing.

Kathleen Gundry, PMP, Program Manager with Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), is the contract project manager for the Forest Service Enterprise Data Warehouse project. Throughout her 30-year career, she has supported federal agency enterprise information management initiatives—facilitating consensus data standards, authoring information quality strategies, proposing data governance solutions, and leading teams in software solutions to data management problems. She has led projects to manage metadata about environmental regulatory programs, apply business intelligence to integrate natural resource and wildland fire data, and harmonize data element metadata to support semantic interoperability to improve cancer biomedical research. Kathleen has a BS in Conservation of Natural Resources from the University of California, Berkeley and an MS in Landscape Architecture from the University of Wisconsin. She enjoys getting out into nature in many ways.