How optimizing data management supports financial systems modernization

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Office of the Chief Financial Officer (OCFO) mission is to resource and enable the ICE mission, while providing sound stewardship through dedication and professionalism of its financial, budgetary and asset management workforce. To support this objective, ICE is working across DHS to execute a Financial Systems Modernization (FSM) program to modernize financial, accounting and other business operations as part of DHS’s overall modernization initiative to update legacy financial systems with an emphasis on security, data integrity and more accurate, transparent financial reporting.

At the foundation of financial systems is the data generated from all of the agency’s financial management business processes. Without an understanding of this data and the ability to directly interact with it, ICE cannot be successful in this large-scale modernization effort. Since 2020, Ernst & Young LLP has been supporting ICE in conducting in-depth analysis of its data to identify relationships, detect data quality issues and understand root causes to address today, prior to migration to a new ERP system.

ICE needed a comprehensive data management platform that will serve as the foundation for data quality analysis, cleansing and migration design to help move the overall modernization program forward. As such, we embarked on a journey to prepare ICE and its Customer Components for this challenge.

Building a data model

The first step was to analyze ICE’s raw data and design an integrated, nonproprietary financial data model (FDM) to help ICE better understand its data. We leveraged its data architecture and financial management experience to iteratively build this data model, by business process, focusing on referential integrity, data populations and required elements to construct and trace complete financial transactions.

Along with this data model, we sought to develop an actionable tool for ICE and ICE’s Customer Components to execute data analysis and track cleansing activities in advance of financial systems migration. We envisioned a secure, cloud-based analytical tool that allowed users to develop queries by functional users, assess data quality, identify areas for standardization and address reconciliation concerns before implementation.

Agencies must have a detailed understanding of their data to confirm that their business decisions and actions are based on an accurate and reliable foundation. This data platform has enabled DHS to develop a deeper understanding of its data, perform analysis to identify those data quality issues and then review the business processes to address the underlying cause, well in advance of ERP migration. This platform will also serve well in testing and migration activities, as ICE already has a reliable and effective process for moving and validating large volumes of data efficiently. However, the data platform alone will not guarantee FSM success. As such, we developed a comprehensive data management and governance plan that will guide the roles, responsibilities and processes to execute the migration and enable digital transformation for DHS.