U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services (USCIS) Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) Program

USCIS is the government agency that oversees lawful immigration to the United States. USCIS receives and processes 7.5 million applications and petitions per year for more than 50 types of immigration benefits. The current process of receiving and processing these applications and petitions was paper-intensive, making it difficult for USCIS to efficiently process immigration benefits. These forms are managed by different case management systems within USCIS based on form type. Getting the forms into the disparate, stovepiped systems is just as challenging as getting the information out. The USCIS Office of Information Technology has leveraged and reused the NIEM schemas and data models. Some services have very complex data requirements and required modeling more than 2,000 elements per form. Across the 80 forms, the 80 percent overlap of element data from each form allowed for significant reuse of the NIEM IEPDs. The use of associations and references is a vital best practice leveraged by these NIEM message exchanges to help manage the complexity and interdependency of the domain data model.