Building the Drinking Water State-Federal-Tribal Information Exchange System (DW-SFTIES) to modernize safe drinking water data

State drinking water programs need support to oversee public health compliance at nearly 150,000 public water systems. To help, the EPA has been providing states with Safe Drinking Water Information System (SDWIS) State software since the 1990s to reduce data management burden and promote national consistency in state implementation of the Public Water System Supervision Program under the Safe Drinking Water Act. The existing SDWIS State software is in critical need of modernization.

States need a 21st century solution for drinking water programs to manage water system inventory information; receive and track large volumes of system compliance monitoring data; manage sampling and monitoring schedules; determine candidate drinking water rules violations; track enforcement actions; and conduct quarterly reporting to the EPA.

E-Enterprise provides the framework for the EPA and states to cooperate on the planning, design, and development of DW-SFTIES. Working through the Modernization Board, the EPA and states completed a planning phase in July 2020 that culminated in a recommendation to build an EPA-hosted, centralized data management system for drinking water programs.

From 2020 to 2022, the Modernization Board provided ongoing guidance and input to the project’s pre-development and product design phases. In 2023, the Board supported the launch of the DW-SFTIES Program Portal where users can find the latest project updates and roadmap, documentation, planning dashboards, and other key resources.

In 2023 and 2024, the Board provided insight and guidance to the project’s development phase. During this phase, the project team documented key user stories and built and tested key functionality in DW-SFTIES.

Other DW-SFTIES resources and tools

What is the DW-SFTIES team working on next?

The DW-SFTIES program management team is continuing iterative product development throughout 2025. The key milestones in this phase will be:

• Delivering quarterly updates and system demonstrations to the DW-SFTIES Board and DW-SFTIES Executive Steering Committee. The DW-SFTIES Board will continue to provide advisory support and project guidance.
• Providing ongoing testing of new functionality through the State-EPA User Acceptance Testing Team.
• Demonstrating product releases for the drinking water and information management communities during regular All Things SDWIS calls.
• Providing EPA-funded support to help states transition to DW-SFTIES. Transition support is available for primacy agency transition planning, data quality/data migration, and modifying state applications to exchange data with DW-SFTIES via application programming interfaces (APIs).
• Developing data mapping/data dictionary dashboards to support primacy agency data mapping efforts.
• Launching the V1.0 production release of DW-SFTIES in November 2025.

The DW-SFTIES project team has leaned into the principles of the E-Enterprise Digital Strategy to guide its development approach. The project has robustly engaged a broad array of partners, applied modern technologies to user needs, and prioritized project transparency and communication. DW-SFTIES is on track to reduce state data management workload and enhance the timeliness and accuracy of drinking water data transferred among drinking water systems, primacy agencies, and the EPA.