Data Underpins Everything and Technology Exists to Serve Data — Federal Energy Regulatory Commission CDO

(US & Canada) Kirsten Dalboe, Chief Data Officer at the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), speaks with Adita Karkera, Ph.D., Chief Data Officer for Government and Public Services at Deloitte, in a video interview, about her professional trajectory, the role of CDO, and data management at FERC.

FERC ensures reliable, safe, secure, and economically efficient energy for consumers at a reasonable cost.

With an undergraduate degree in civil engineering and a passion for building things differently, Dalboe landed her first job as a Systems Engineer supporting the U.S. Navy. There, she built a mine warfare countermeasures project and a software program.

While working on the project, Dalboe realized that it was all about the data, after which she took up the entire environmental section of the software. As a systems engineer, she designed user interfaces, wrote system requirements specifications, test scripts, interface control documents, and designed data sets.

Through that job, Dalboe understood how everything circles back to data and technology, and the software is the vehicle for that. After that, she moved into international development for a period, which also required consistent definitions around different data points.

Eventually, Dalboe got her master’s degree in technology management and joined the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as a Customer Engagement Manager. In that role, she met many different DHS components, understood their technology needs, and found everything boiling down to data.

At some point, the undersecretary of management at DHS asked Dalboe to lead a data project, given her comprehensive background in underlying source systems. The project was called DHS Cube and became her official entry point into a data role.

After building out that program, Dalboe was appointed as the Chief Data Architect at DHS, making her a federal employee. Serving nine years in this position, she pivoted to the Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General as the Director of Data Operations and held that role for two and a half years.

Next, the Evidence Act came into being, and as agencies started hiring CDOs, Dalboe applied for and got the position at FERC, and has been in the role for over 5 years now.

Speaking from experience, Dalboe says that data underpins everything, and technology exists to serve data, making it critical for organizations to do data right.

Emphasizing FERC’s context, she says that it is a small regulatory independent industry of 1,500 employees and an initial budget of around $550 million. Compared to DHS, the space is smaller, but since it regulates an entire industry, the relationship with data differs.

FERC gets large volumes of data externally, which has been an interesting paradigm to think about in terms of the data space, says Dalboe. The agency's mission is economically efficient, safe, reliable, and secure energy for consumers, and as a small agency, it has 13 program offices.

The offices span areas of legal policy, market regulation, engineering, and agency operations and have administrative law judges to fish biologists as staff.

When asked where the CDO role sits in the organization, Dalboe mentions sitting in the office of the Executive Director while technically reporting to the CIO. Delving deeper, she reiterates the role of data as a facilitator in administrative and operational work.

With the massive volume of incoming data, it is mandatory to process all of that correctly, without missing statutory dates. Further, Dalboe notes that her office carries out the process of the Paperwork Reduction Act, which drives how the government can request data from the public.

In continuation, she states that FERC currently has 115 active information collections with industry, which is a wide array of data, where the team gets general compliance filings. Additionally, there is market data, operator performance matrix, power generation data, trading data, weather, and seismic data, which are used to monitor markets.

The CDO team detects fraudulent behavior, pay reliability issues, inspects energy infrastructure, and the economic and geographic impact analysis of regulations, says Dalboe. She continues that her team has the mission to support through leadership, governance, policy setting, advisory services, and collaborative outreach to optimize enterprise data and information assets.

Furthermore, Dalboe states that her team has two branches — the data policy and stewardship branch and the data engineering and analytics branch. She considers these as the two sides of the data life cycle.

The data policy and stewardship branch side of the data life cycle works on building and maturing data governance. There is a data stewardship framework and partnering across all the program offices to work with all the stewards to ensure the cataloging of all data assets and metadata. The agency also offers coaching services to help stewards perform their function as stewards as effectively as possible.

Thereafter, the data engineering analytics branch is building out a cloud-hosted data and analytics platform to provide easier access to all of the data. The team ensures a well-functioning data platform with all the data pipelines and ingesting the different data assets into the platform.

Dalboe concludes, stating that then the data becomes findable, and the team provides the right tools and technologies to facilitate analysis. The tools include business intelligence tools, data science tools, geospatial analytics tools, and data science notebooks.

CDO Magazine appreciates Kirsten Dalboe for sharing her insights with our global community.