Client
Office of Personnel Management (OPM)
Services
Enterprise Human Resource Integration Data Warehouse Support
Year
2014
OPM’s Enterprise Human Resource Integration Data Warehouse (EHRI DW) collects government-wide human resources (HR), payroll, and training workforce data for over 2.1 million active employees and retired federal employees, annuitants, and their family members. Agencies utilize the EHRI DW to research employee demographic information, analyze agency and government-wide statistics, develop HR strategies, and predict the size, scope, and characteristics of the future workforce. The EHRI DW also supports standards definition and compliance, reporting, database management, workflow automation application development.
The Challenge
Prior to the EHRI initiative, there were no data standards or processes for consolidating or disseminating HR data across the federal government, or even within one single agency. Thelack of cohesion made it difficult for agencies to accurately project HR requirements and trends. OPM was tasked with developing a government-wide, single repository of record for all federal employee data.
Our Solution
Working closely with OPM, The Center for Organizational Excellence (COE) defined, developed, and implemented the data architecture, secure data ingest processes, data standards, build data feeds, and processes for data validation that support bi-weekly HR data submissions from over 70 federal agencies and providers. The EHRI system streamlined and automated business processes by enabling the electronic collection of HR information from federal agencies. It also provided all agencies with consistent process and data standards for consolidating HR data.
COE directed the development and sustainment of EHRI at every stage, designing a system that supports the needs of its users, increasing operational efficiency, and lowering costs. COE supported the development of the Guide to Human Resources Reporting, which is crucial for OPM in establishing standards with other agencies on how HR data should be transferred to OPM. Today, COE maintains and supports the EHRI system while assisting with strategic imperatives to expand EHRI functionality, accessibility, and user base.
COE works with OPM to assist agencies with analyzing the government’s workforce and supporting the federal employee lifecycle through informed human capital decision making. COE designed and built a Statistical Data Mart (SDM) for analyzing cross-government data related to the size, scope, and characteristics of the federal workforce. This data is used to predict future trends and to develop personnel strategies to ensure a high-performing, efficient federal workforce. We also created data feeds to send EHRI data to both FedScope.gov and data.gov.
COE’s support for EHRI emphasized rigorous enforcement of the standards that enable the exchange of data between HR IT systems inside and outside of OPM. COE collected, analyzed, and performed quality analyses on the agency submissions, and built a data quality reporting application that delivers detailed error information to data providers. These reports helped identify the root cause of data quality issues so that providers could prevent them from happening in the future.
The Result
By streamlining data handling and consolidating infrastructure, OPM achieved a significant reductionin overall cost of ownership for HR data. In addition to cost savings, COE’s data quality initiatives helped ensure that EHRI stakeholders were able to access reliable, accurate workforce data that could be used for workforce strategy, planning, forecasting, and reporting. EHRI has helped OPM improve the availability and accuracy of official HR data, provide HR eliminate data inaccuracies introduced by human error, increase operational efficiency, and achieve millions of dollards in savings.
