FDIC's Corporate Data Sharing Initiative and Data Warehouse Projects

(Audit Report No. 98-055, June 19, 1998)

The Office of Inspector General (OIG) has completed a survey of the implementation and development of FDIC's data warehouse projects and FDIC's Corporate Data Sharing (CDS) strategy. This report is being issued following a survey phase so that management can immediately consider the relevant issues and our recommendations. Our survey identified other areas that may benefit from additional audit efforts, and we may initiate further audit work at a later date. The objectives of the survey were to determine whether development of FDIC's data warehouses (1) is adhering to the FDIC `s System Development Life Cycle (SDLC) procedures and FDIC Database Management Systems Standards; (2) will ensure that user requirements have been adequately defined; (3) will ensure that the systems satisfy user requirements in a cost-effective and timely manner; (4) results in systems capable of tying together a variety of data in a consistent format for reporting; and (5) is being developed with controls that ensure the security, availability, consistency, reliability and timeliness of data. Our survey efforts focused on identifying issues for further review related to these objectives and was limited to activities of the Legal Data Warehouse (LDW) and Financial Data Warehouse (FDW) project teams, and the role of the CDS project team in overseeing data warehouse initiatives.

FDIC's FDW and LDW projects were generally adhering to accepted system development standards. Divisional user requirements were developed by representatives of the various sections and adequately defined. Further, planned and implemented controls ensured the security, reliability, and timeliness of data. However, to ensure that overall corporate user requirements are satisfied in a cost-effective manner and that data are tied together in a consistent format for reporting, inter-project coordination among data warehouse projects needed improvement. Although one of the objectives of the CDS project was to coordinate on-going data warehouse initiatives, the CDS project was initiated after divisional data warehouse projects were underway. In addition, after being established, the CDS project team did not ensure adequate coordination among individual project teams to discuss current issues and to share knowledge obtained and approaches identified by individual data warehouse projects. For example, although some LDW project team members were aware of end user software and technical architecture techniques being used by the FDW project, the Legal Division indicated its need for an immediate solution to support its present information needs. Therefore, the LDW project team elected to proceed rather than wait for a standardized solution that would support the Legal Division's needs and ensure consistency and compatibility among individual data warehouses. The software and techniques used by the FDW allowed users to retrieve data without the assistance of technical experts. Finally, CDS oversight of individual projects was significantly reduced because the CDS budget for 1998, originally proposed at $3 million, was reduced to $1 million.

The report contains four recommendations for improvements to the Director, DIRM. We recommended that the Corporate Data Sharing Committee (CDS) establish regularly scheduled meetings and take a stronger leadership role for data warehouse initiatives, conduct a review to determine whether query tools and technical architecture can be standardized, consider requesting a budget adjustment to ensure adequate CDS oversight, and reduce the complexity for one data warehouse to ease reporting.

Management provided a response that satisfies the concerns addressed in the audit report and that provided the requisites for management decisions for all recommendations.