FEMA RFI: FEMA Data Exchange (FEMADex) Agile Delivery Services

Notice ID 70FA3123I00000007

FEMADex Objectives and Pilot Phase

FEMADex is a cloud-based data and analytics platform designed to meet five core mission needs:

• Discover, access, and gather data from internal and external sources;
• Maintain data integrity, security, and confidentiality;
• Integrate cross-cutting and disparate datasets;
• Analyze data to identify meaningful insights; and
• Disseminate data and insights through reports and visualizations.

Close and ongoing collaboration with users is key to ensuring that FEMADex successfully delivers value to customers and supports the Agency mission. The FEMADex user community consists of staff at FEMA headquarters, across the 10 FEMA regions, and the FEMA disaster workforce; members of other federal agencies; state, local, tribal, and territorial (SLTT) partners; private sector organizations; and the public.

FEMADex will ingest structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data of analytic value to the Agency from FEMA and non-FEMA source systems into a central, secure environment. Once the data is in the system, users will be able to create their own workspaces where they can combine, manipulate, and analyze multiple datasets as their roles allow. Users can choose to share content within team workspaces to collaboratively develop analytic products such as reports, datasets, models, scripts, algorithms, dashboards, visualizations, and accompanying documentation. Users can then disseminate finalized, approved products to a wider audience within an enterprise workspace. Products approved for external release will be made available to FEMA’s external emergency management partners and the public as well.

The EDAMI Program uses Agile methodologies to deliver the FEMADex solution, emphasizing the incremental release of system software, features, and updates in many small deployments rather than in fewer, larger releases. This approach delivers critical functionality to users more quickly and gives development teams the flexibility to gauge effectiveness, correct issues, and incorporate lessons learned early and often. It also creates the opportunity to integrate new technologies as they emerge, extending the viable lifespan of the system.

The EDAMI Program is currently in the FEMADex Pilot Phase, in which FEMADex will be stood up in a Microsoft Azure Commercial environment within the FEMA Enterprise Cloud, hardened to obtain Authorization to Proceed (ATP), connected to FEMA source systems, and used to ingest FEMA program data. The Pilot Phase will target the core capabilities required to support the mission needs described above, pursuant to an early learning milestone known as the FEMADex Minimum Viable Product (MVP). The five use cases identified for the FEMADex MVP milestone are:

1. Curate Data: Users will be able to identify the data they want to pull into FEMADex, arrange for its ingestion and storage, ensure that it is usable and up-to-date, and make it available to other users throughout FEMA.
2. Analyze Data: Users will be able to access multiple datasets in FEMADex, combine datasets to create new ones, conduct analysis, and develop new data analysis products such as dashboards, reports, and visualizations…

More here.

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