NRC Data Strategy
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Introduction
The NRC licenses and regulates the Nation's civilian use of radioactive materials and is committed to the standards of reasonable assurance of adequate protection. In carrying out its duties, the NRC captures, creates, manages, and uses data from a variety of sources and in a variety of forms. This data informs the agency's operational and regulatory decision-making, and it supports all federal reporting requirements.
As the agency continues to enhance its position as a modern, risk-informed regulator, leveraging data as a strategic asset remains a top priority. Managing data effectively from end to end helps to ensure that the data is secure, accessible, available, and trusted. This enables the agency to leverage that data within and across organizational bounds and functional programs to gain insights to support and promote its mission.
Data management is not simply a function of information technology as it requires coordination and collaboration from all agency mission, mission support, and corporate support functions. All agency staff have a responsibility to serve as stewards of the agency's data throughout its lifecycle. Creating a culture that understands the importance of data is just as significant as the methodologies and technologies used to manage the data itself. This culture will underpin the success of the Data Strategy and each of its supporting activities.
The goals and strategies outlined in this document represent a collaborative approach to be undertaken by all agency offices, programs, functions, and staff in the continued growth and maturity of the agency's data management efforts. Through this collaboration, the NRC will advance its use of modern methods and tools while promoting a culture that continually seeks to derive ever greater value from agency data. Achieving the goals set forth within this document will provide tangible, cross-cutting value to the agency's programs by further enabling the agency to turn data into evidence, knowledge, decision-making, and strategic results.
Vision
The management and use of data are the collective responsibility of all agency staff in carrying out a wide range of programs and functions. Though data may be captured and created locally, its value to the agency can be derived in innumerable ways through data analytics, data science, and data-driven methodologies. It is therefore the vision of the NRC that "data empowers the enterprise" in that it provides the means and the opportunities to execute the agency's mission and to enable continuous improvement along the way.
Goals and Strategies
- Mature the Data Architecture - The NRC will enhance the agency data architecture to ensure sufficient and scalable capacity to ingest and process data from existing and new data sources to meet agency business needs. This may include the integration of data-generating systems, data lakes, operational data stores, data warehouses, localized databases, and data marts which will collectively provide robust support for current and future data needs.
- Enhance Data Governance - The NRC will develop, document, refine, implement, communicate, and enforce data policies and standards to ensure the standardized management and use of data across the agency. These data policies and standards will be developed with input and insights from enterprise architecture, data architecture, information resource management, database management, data warehouse, data analytics, data privacy, data security, and business subject matter experts to ensure that data is effectively managed throughout its lifecycle. These rules will also ensure that the agency is able to meet its data transparency objectives in accordance with its duties to protect personally identifiable and other sensitive information.
- Leverage Cloud Capabilities - In conjunction with the agency's Cloud Smart Strategy, the NRC will continually assess and work to leverage the enterprise data capabilities made available through cloud services. Leveraging these capabilities will enable data integration across and between selected cloud environments, and to/from the remaining on-premises architecture. As part of the decision-making process for transitioning applications to the cloud, the agency will assess and mitigate impacts to the data architecture.
- Leverage Modern Capabilities - The NRC will leverage modern capabilities to enable the secure collection of and access to various forms of data within the agency data architecture. This will include the expanded use of web forms and automated data collection capabilities to facilitate the efficient use of stakeholder input into agency actions; the investigation of opportunities to leverage streaming media and machine-to-machine data feeds; and the use of modern tools for enterprise content search and discovery.
- Provide Data as a Service - The NRC will develop a more robust enterprise Data Service to promote the ability of business users to leverage the data needed to perform data analysis in support of business outcomes. This will allow business users to submit requests for data services, engage data SMEs in the development and documentation of requirements, and work collaboratively with data SMEs to develop data sets that can be used in downstream reporting, analysis, and visualization. The Data Service will also promote proactive data analytics through data science techniques that will identify patterns and correlations that have the potential to inform agency operations. The Data Service will work with agency stakeholders to prioritize business needs.
- Identify and Fill Data Gaps - The NRC will leverage its Data Service to engage business users in the identification of data requirements to meet mission and operational objectives. If data gaps are identified, the Data Service will seek out methods of sourcing the desired data while managing required updates to the data architecture to include the agency data catalog. The NRC will support data sourcing from internal and external sources as deemed appropriate while adhering to data collection policies and standards.
- Establish Roles and Responsibilities - The NRC will establish, communicate, and reinforce the roles and responsibilities associated with the management of data throughout its lifecycle. This will require sponsorship and collaboration from leadership and agency staff as this represents an enterprise-wide approach to data management. The agency will formalize these roles and responsibilities through updates to its data governance processes and associated documentation as well as through the development of internal directives as needed.
- Provide Role-based Training - The NRC will establish role-based training for key data management roles. This will ensure that staff can enhance and continue to reinforce their data management skills within and beyond their respective functional roles. The agency will also establish general data management training as part of its core training curriculum.
- Improve Data Management Resource Pool - The NRC will fill data management skill gaps across its offices through a combination of selective hiring, cross-training, and the acquisition of vendor-supported services. This ensures that key data roles are adequately staffed in the areas of Data Architecture, Data Science, and Data Analytics. The agency will leverage its Strategic Workforce Planning, Capacity Planning, and Competency Modeling programs to enable these efforts.
- Integrate Data into the Software Development Lifecycle - The NRC will integrate the management of its Data Architecture into the agency’s SDLC processes to ensure that software development consider potential impacts to and required modifications of the data architecture and data catalog. This ensures consistency across the technology and data architectures while maintaining the accessibility and availability of data by downstream services.
- Mature Data Science and Analytics - The NRC will continue to mature its use of data science and analytics tools and methodologies to simplify access to and consumption of insights gleaned from agency data. This will include expanding the use of existing capabilities, enhancing agency data governance, and enhancing training opportunities in data science and analytics concepts, principles, and approved solutions.
- Mature Data Transparency - The NRC will continue to identify and support opportunities to promote data transparency by extending data insights to external stakeholders where appropriate and in compliance with agency policy. The agency will leverage curated data sets and dashboard visualizations to ensure that data insights are easy to understand and simple to navigate.
- Promote Data Quality - The NRC will continue to engage data and functional subject matter experts in the standardization, normalization, quality assessment, and deduplication of data to promote trust and confidence in the agency’s data sources.
- Unite Around Data - The NRC will continue to leverage the momentum of existing data analytics initiatives by creating new opportunities to share data-driven insights, innovative ideas, and data successes across the organization. This helps to ensure cross-functional collaboration in the ideation and innovation of data analytics capabilities while enabling knowledge sharing and cultural reinforcement.