IData Insights

Building a data system inventory is necessary, but not easy.  This post describes the 8 steps we recommend when  building your data system inventory at your organization.

This blog post will cover the benefits of having an inventory of your data systems at your organization (such as a higher education institution). Part of the knowledgebase for data governance (also...

Implementing effective reporting at any organization is not easy (including higher education institutions). This post outlines the barriers to effective reporting and provides solutions to eliminate...

In this post we review, from our experience and knowledge, various points in making the case for pragmatic data governance (or data intelligence) return on investment (ROI). Good data governance will...

We were searching the web recently and came across this oldie but goodie survey by the Higher Education Data Warehousing (HEDW) forum (www.hedw.org) titled “2017 HEDW Survey of Top 10 Issues”....

We’re a big fan of Dataversity (www.dataversity.org) which provides data education for business and IT professionals.  We came across their “Data Governance Trends in 2018” article, dated January 24,...

Unsure of where your organization is in the data governance (data intelligence) process?   

Then ask and answer the following questions:

At the end of last year, we attended a regional Institutional Research (IR) conference and sat in on a discussion group regarding data governance (data intelligence) challenges. We loved the great...

The American Council of Education (ACE) came out with a brief, titled “The Data-Enabled Executive: Using Analytics for Student Success and Sustainability”, to increase data-informed decision making...

In their Top 10 IT Issues, 2017, EDUCAUSE identified “data management and governance” as issue #6 and defined it as the need to “improve…the management of institutional data through data standards,...

In their Top 10 IT Issues, 2017, EDUCAUSE identified “data management and governance” as an issue to “improve…the management of institutional data through data standards, integration, protection,...

We are often asked about data governance (or as we call it data intelligence) such as what is it and what are some key best practices in data governance. This post summarizes our thoughts on this. We...

 In their Top 10 IT Issues, 2017, EDUCAUSE identified “data management and governance” as an issue to “improve…the management of institutional data through data standards, integration, protection,...

In their Top 10 IT Issues, 2017, EDUCAUSE identified “data management and governance” as an issue to “improve…the management of institutional data through data standards, integration, protection,...

More and more organizations are implementing data governance (also referred to as data intelligence) to better document their data, and, from our experience, this usually means a large committee with...

A recent New York Times article explores the burgeoning world of student data in an attempt to explain why it holds such power, particularly with at-risk students. Recent work in learning analytics...

As you many know, IData publishes a number of publicly-available definitions and specifications for public consumption, including national data sets like IPEDS and CDS, state bodies like SCHEV in...

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...

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...

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...

As technology consultants for organizations (those in higher education, corporations and non-profits), IData is well-acquainted with the practicalities and pitfalls of running an organization. For...

Just a quick thought for today...Data Governance (and data intelligence and data management) takes a lot of time, and some people are put off by that because they can't quantify or see the long term...