IData Insights

Aaron Walker

Aaron Walker
Aaron joined IData in 2014 after over 20 years in higher education, including more than 15 years providing analytics and decision support services. Aaron’s role at IData includes establishing data governance, training data stewards, and improving business intelligence solutions.

Recent Posts

80% Preparation, 20% Misinterpretation: Citizen Data Science in the Context of No Governance

This post is inspired by two pieces of terminology that have seemingly been everywhere this year, and one factoid that’s been circulating for years. One term is “self-service business intelligence,”...

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Back to Basics - What Goes Into a Business Glossary

Recently we discussed the differences between a business glossary and a data dictionary, and why you are likely to need both at your organization. In this post we want to delve more deeply into the...

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Back to Basics - Data Dictionary vs. Business Glossary

Having accessible knowledge is an important part of data governance (or also called data intelligence) and we thought in this post (and in upcoming posts) we would go back to the basics. Topic this...

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Trend for Shadow Analytics

In a previous post we shared some thoughts about shadow systems, and how they are symptomatic of poor data governance (data intelligence) practices as much as, if not more than, users seeking to...

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Shadow Systems Explained

Everyone knows shadow systems are bad, and yet they still proliferate. Rather than enumerate once again why you should take pains to avoid them, we want to spend some time in this post exploring why...

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Data Governance is Foremost About Helping, Not Controlling

This blog post discusses the perception of data governance (and data intelligence). It sounds difficult and controlling. Maybe it should be called data guidance instead. Data governance should help...

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Do You Know Where Your Data Has Been and What It’s Been Doing?

The profusion of data sources and systems organizations including higher education introduces plenty of challenges (headaches?) for data managers and consumers. One of the most difficult challenges...

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The Promise of Analytics

Of our clients who have embarked on an analytics program, many of them have seen the same issues emerge that came up when they introduced Business Intelligence (BI) tools, as well as historically...

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Chief Data Officer, Part Two

We posted previously about the Chief Data Officer role, inspired by a great article by Mike Anderson. In his article he points out that only a few institutions of higher education have such a...

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Chief Data Officer, Part One

Interesting article in the most recent issue of Educause Review, called "The Chief Data Officer in Higher Education." Written by Mike Kelly, Chief Data Officer (CDO) at the University of South...

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Building a Better Data Culture

Anyone who's ever attended a Data Cookbook demonstration, or heard us talk about it at a higher education conference, has heard us say this: "Reporting is not a technology problem." While we think...

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Migrating Reports - You have to Analyze the Functional Need

So, we're converting from X to Y - can you help us re-write our reports?

Often when an organization is changing from one system to another, they look to automate the process. This works fine,...

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