U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services Streamlines Data Migration and Data Management Process

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) administers and supports the nation’s lawful citizenship and immigration system, safeguarding its integrity and promise by efficiently and fairly adjudicating requests for immigration benefits while protecting Americans, securing the homeland, and honoring our values. The Identity, Records, and National Security Delivery Division (IRSDD) resides within the Immigration Records and Identity Services Directorate, and supports the provision of immigration, employment, and identity information accurately and completely.

USCIS provides timely and accurate immigration status and information to public benefit‐granting agencies and employment authorization to employer. USCIS’s responsibilities include two mission‐critical programs, e‐Verify and SAVE verification. “e‐Verify” helps organizations (employers) throughout the U.S. confirm the eligibility of their candidate for employment to work in the U.S. “ SAVE Verification” provides fast, secure, and reliable immigration status information to assist benefit‐granting agencies at the Federal, state, and local levels in maintaining their program integrity.

IRSDD worked with the Office of Information Technology’s Salesforce CRM team to determine the data architecture for a new product to replace the Avant CRM.

By adopting NIEM structures and implementing a robust data management process, IRNSDD was able to quickly reconcile broken reports and transition new reports to the new data structure with ease.

USCIS has the goal of strengthening and improving system integration and interoperability, which is essential in ensuring the performance and quality of the SAVE and E‐Verify programs – there is a critical need to manage the most current data and appropriately share that data with authorized partners across the private and public sectors.

USCIS has implemented a variety of technologies to support these programs, including using NIEM to support data governance, data standardization, and uniformed data sharing internally and externally.

As part of the larger USCIS data Governance Tiger Team, IRSDD helped create and publish the USCIS data strategy document in 2019. NIEM was used to harmonize 55+ data attributes across USCIS. Using NIEM data descriptions and code list, the IRNSDD technical team was able to streamline data migration (by conducting uniform data mapping) from a legacy CRM system to the Salesforce CRM platform in less than 12 months ‐‐‐ and as importantly, mature the organization’s overall data management by harmonizing attributes across multiple legacy systems using several NIEM domains.

Incorporating and adapting NIEM was essential in USCIS IRNSDD’s successfully completing a complicated data migration effort on critical systems. Importantly, the legacy data transfer to target platform never went offline.

USCIS’s Verification Branch teams are mandated to adopt NIEM standards for any new service developed starting with next iteration of SAVE web services. IRNSDD’s Person Centric Identity Services (PCIS) initiative is adopting and promoting NIEM standards, which is considered imperative when integrating disparate systems.