Stanford Data Governance supports the Business Intelligence Comptency Center and the development of Stanford’s BI dashboards. Many of Stanford’s current Data Governance activities fall under the umbrella of Stanford University Data Stewardship (SUDS), which focuses primarily on the development of definitions and other metadata for data elements used in BI reporting projects.

Stanford’s Data Governance Center, which houses the SUDS Data Dictionary and other metadata resources, can be found at https://dgcenter.stanford.edu/.

An annotated index of Stanford’s Data Governance resources is available at https://stanford.box.com/GetStartedDataGovernance.

In keeping with Stanford University’s educational mission and commitment to openness, our Data Governance materials are made freely available wherever possible. We welcome ongoing discussions around these, and appreciate hearing about downstream uses of Stanford’s Data Governance resources, especially in conference presentations, white papers, or other public contexts.

If you have any questions, would like to discuss ways that you or your team could become involved, would like to request access to any of our resources, or believe that you’ve identified a Data Governance, Data Quality or Data Stewardship opportunity at Stanford, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Kathleen Warmoth
Data Stewardship Coordinator
kwarmoth@stanford.edu

We are delighted to announce Stanford’s new Data Stewardship Coordinator, Kathleen Warmoth.

Kathleen has been with Stanford for 10 years, most recently serving as the Academic Data Manager in the School of Medicine. She has a great deal of experience with data structures, definitions and the appropriate application of various data types. She has implemented consistent nomenclature associated with faculty data across the school, and established best practices for using this data. She has also worked closely with the school’s Data Governance Board, MedIRT, Office of Institutional Planning, and various other Dean’s Office units as a subject matter expert to ensure that faculty data correctly syncs to downstream systems in order to provide accurate reporting and look-up tools across the school. She has also been an active participant in the university’s Faculty Data Stewardship group.

We are very pleased to welcome Kathleen as the coordinator of Stanford’s data stewardship and data governance efforts. Please feel free to contact her at kwarmoth@stanford.edu.

At this year’s AIR Forum, the annual conference of the Association for Institutional Research, Kathryn Flack Potts participated in a panel on data governance in higher education. The panel, organized by Kathy Schmidke Felts of the University of Missouri, also included data governance leaders from Ball State University, the University of California-Irvine, and the University of Nevada-Las Vegas.

Slides [PDF]: 

Stanford is looking for our next data stewardship coordinator.

The position description can be found at https://stanford.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?job=65904

The recently released ‘staff map’, a joint effort of Stanford University data stewardship and University Human Resources, illustrates major groupings and properties of University employees and non-employee affiliates. These include benefits eligibility, exempt status, hourly vs. salaried pay, and more.

This and other data stewardship ‘maps’ are available at http://irds.stanford.edu/maps.

A major recent focus of our data governance and stewardship efforts has been the development of standards, best practices, and especially documentation — metadata about metadata. These materials are compiled into an annotated index of resources, Getting Started with Stanford Data Governance (metadata about metadata about metadata?).

This document is intended as a quick reference for users from a variety of perspectives, compiling information on themes including:

• The SUDS Dictionary (the basics)
• Goals and principles
• Field inventory and usage
• Running a Data Stewardship Group
• Creating Content in the SUDS Dictionary
  • Developing definitions
  • Creating new term names
  • Statuses
  • Policy references
  • Reporting definitions
• Using Collibra
• Further Reading: Data Governance and Data Stewardship at Stanford
  • Data Governance and Data Stewardship at Stanford
  • The Stanford Data Governance Maturity Model
  • Miscellaneous

The document will be updated as materials evolve, with updates announced here (RSS this page to easily watch for updates) as well as circulated to core participants in Stanford’s DG/DS efforts.

Kathryn Flack Potts also talked about Stanford’s data stewardship efforts on November 20, at the California Association for Institutional Research (CAIR).

Thanks to all of the CAIR participants for terrific questions and discussion! Please do reach out and keep the conversation going — it would be terrific for those of us facing these issues in higher ed to continue sharing ideas (and placemats!).

Matt Hoying talked about building an effective data stewardship organization at Collibra’s West Coast User Conference on November 20.

An informal presentation, at the invitation of a former student:

Stay tuned next week for two more installments of Stanford DG/DS’s November 2014 lecture tour!

The recently released ‘calendar map’, a joint effort of Stanford University data stewardship and IR&DS, illustrates relationships between annual calendars and other time periods at Stanford, including the fiscal year (9/1-8/31), academic year (9/23-8/22, for AY2013-14), and GFS aid year (10/1-9/30).

This and other data stewardship ‘maps’ are available at http://irds.stanford.edu/maps.

As of June 3, our SUDS Data Dictionary has migrated from Confluence to Stanford’s new Collibra-based Data Governance Center.

Initial users are extremely enthusiastic about the extremely powerful content management capabilities that this tool provides.

User resources include the ‘SUDS-ZOO Dictionary‘ sandbox, where users can experiment freely with the tool, without editing live content, as well as documentation compiled in our Collibra Resources community.