Some questions popped into my head:
Many schools have adopted data governance practices and created jobs to support the work. Higher Education organizations such as AIR, EDUCAUSE, and NACUBO have emphasized the value added and skills needed for data management. From my observations of IData's Data Cookbook clients and from following industry chatter, I know that data governance is widespread in HE; my curiosity was not about whether it was happening. I became curious about where it was situated within an organization and how was it labeled?
When I mentioned my observation to attendees at the spring conferences I attended, they confirmed my observation. Most people I spoke with had gone through a renaming and a reorganization within their department formerly called Institutional Research. As staff retired or left the organization, changes were made to reflect work that the department had been doing for several years prior to the name change. Or, a name change signaled a new approach to the department. Several people humorously commented on the increasing length of the newly renamed entities. For example, I have seen the name "Office of Institutional Effectiveness, Strategic Planning, Analytics, and Institutional Research". Often the name acronyms are clever.
Upon my return home, I was still curious that the phrase "data governance" had not crept into the new labeling trend. I searched for more information and discovered that Association of Institutional Research (AIR) published a paper in 2016 that describes new recommendations for managing a central data analytics program focussed on assessment and effectiveness. AIR uses an IR/IE abbreviation - referencing both Institutional Research and Institutional Effectiveness. What I observed as an outsider in the spring of 2022 reflected a trend first heralded within the IR/IE profession almost ten years ago.
The changes that AIR recommended to IR/IE departments in 2016 represented a shift for IR/IE from a service model targeted to a president/provost and external reporting to a service model targeted at nearly any employee. This list provides more detail about those 2016 recommendations:
To continue my sleuthing, I next explored the EDUCAUSE website and quickly located a working group for "Chief Data Officers". Membership is open to anyone with leadership or authority in data management, whether or not the job title was Chief Data Officer. In reading the list of job titles for EDUCAUSE members active in this working group, I see that the language is all over the map. Here are a few sample job titles:
Interestingly, no trend for "data governance", or even "data", in these job titles.
What does my crystal ball tell me about these trends in labels and titles? I personally don't have a preference or recommendation, but I will offer a prediction. I think "effectiveness" and "assessment" will continue to trend in department names, and I think the job title for the person tasked with leadership will have a title of Vice President, Vice Provost, or other senior academic administrative title. Data governance work will be a portfolio item within these units. I do not think "data governance" and the chief data officer role will trend as department labels and job titles. Why? The words "effectiveness" and "assessment" imply more concrete value to the organization than "data governance". Data governance certainly has inherent value, but "assessment" indicates an organization will use data to measure operations and take the corrective action that the data indicates. Data governance is assumed to occur, because it is widely understood now that robust analytics cannot happen without data governance. Assessment and effectiveness indicate an organization has applied what it learned through data analysis. Another reason I predict that "data governance" will not be obvious in IR/IE department names is that data governance work is best performed at the operational or tactical level within decentralized operational units, by staff who will not report to IR/IE even via a dotted line. For example, the Director of Human Resources is the best person to hold responsibility for defining data within the human resources domain, not a staff member in IR/IE.
Thanks for reading my thoughts. I hope you enjoyed them.
Data governance is critical for all organizations because it instills trust in data, improves decision making and helps people. For successful data governance, a data governance solution like the Data Cookbook provides the framework, processes and content that is required. If you need help implementing data governance or data intelligence, remember that IData provides data governance services. A data governance solution like the Data Cookbook can help in successful implementation of data governance at an organization thus improving data quality, trust in data, and decision-making. Feel free to
(image credit: StockSnap_OQ9T43QXGW_Frames_IRNaming_BP #1222)