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 Carolina (USC), the article hits some of the same notes that we emphasize when we talk about data management, and the way(s) the Data Cookbook can help you accomplish your data management, intelligence and governance needs.

It sounds like USC is already making great strides, having appointed Data Stewards years ago and having continued to evolve their role and charge. Now they're ready to go all in on their version of Data Governance (data intelligence), and we surely wish them the best of luck. (It's possible we have a product or set of services that might be able to help.)

The whole article is available here.

We were particularly pleased with this quote:

[T]he principles of data stewardship hold that data should be managed by those with daily responsibility for its collection, processing, maintenance, and appropriate use — in short, those who best understand the data and bear the legal, regulatory, and compliance risks pertaining to it. Consequently, data governance requires both concentrated leadership — the CDO — and broad participation by those who "own" the data — the data stewards.

We also liked this one:

Working with stakeholders and data stewards alike, a CDO should support processes such as change management, reference data management, and proactive communication. She should champion an enterprise data glossary and ensure critical data elements are defined. He should work with functional teams and institutional researchers to continuously monitor key data elements for missing or nonconforming values and take corrective actions before reports are generated.

We're obviously a little biased, but we believe that the Data Cookbook, implemented properly, gives your data stewards the collaborative knowledge management tools they need in order to work together on enterprise definitions, and to generate and store the critical mass of data awareness needed to embark on both simple and advanced analytics and business intelligence programs. Feel free to  .

Additional people-related resources regarding data governance and data intelligence can be found here.  Feel free to check out Part Two of our Chief Data Officer post at: http://blog.idatainc.com/chief-data-officer-part-2lLink.

Also feel free to review our other data steward resources located at this blog post.

(image credit Icons_10 Executive-Manager #1045)