Fiscal Year 2024 Annual Report

The Academic Learning Data domain was created along with its four secondary domains. As a result, the Learning Data secondary domain under Human Resources was renamed to Professional Learning Data to differentiate that data from the new Academic Learning Data primary domain. We also added domain descriptions for all primary and secondary domains, edited and approved by the data stewards. The descriptions will be added to the data governance website and the data catalog.

 

New Primary and Secondary domain stewards were appointed and received onboarding and training. A BuckeyeLearn playlist was published to help train and educate any interested data stewards while we work to create custom onboarding training products. The Person stewards committee was established and held regular meetings to consider issues of data classification and best practices. We onboarded over a dozen new data stewards this year for new domains and stewardship changes. The data stewards met every other month and covered a wide range of topics from FAFSA and Student Financial Aid data to academic learning data.

 

One data element, a single BuckID with 16-digit number, which is now also a Medical Center ID badge, was classified as S4 data. Although only one official data classification change has been processed this fiscal year, a significant amount of activity has occurred related to data classification. We convened a working group on data classification and designed a ServiceNow form that is about to be implemented for new data element classifications or proposed classification changes. For Love Data Week, the Data Governance team hosted a Compliance Academy on data classification that was attended by over 60 Ohio State faculty and staff and received a great deal of positive feedback. Since only student directory data (not withheld) is currently the only data explicitly classified as S1 – Public, we have embarked on an effort to explicitly classify the data that is shared publicly and drive to consistency between how data is treated and its official classification. Following several focus groups to gain feedback on the IDP Calculator and ideas for improvements, a proposal was submitted for its redevelopment. While we wait for prioritization and resourcing, we are working on updating IDP Calculator data classifications as needed and have convened a working group to update the IDP supporting documents.

 

The most exciting development this fiscal year has been obtaining and implementing a new new data catalog tool, data.world, in partnership with the Medical Center ACE team. A data catalog is an inventory of metadata that enables data users to find and request access to data. It can also contain a glossary of enterprise terminology and acronyms. The new catalog tool was purchased early in the fiscal year. We attended a three-month series of learning workshops using an initial use case from the Office of University Advancement and officially implemented the production tenant with that content on December 1, 2023. Since then, we have focused on onboarding additional content and solving technical challenges. We have developed scripts to perform initial metadata population from source systems such as using delivered PeopleSoft table and field descriptions to provide initial descriptions for the Student ODS data in the Reporting and Analytics Environment (RAE) which can be updated and enhanced by data stewards, SMEs or user suggestions. We are working with SMEs to add catalog contents for space data, learning data and additional Advancement data. We have loaded all approved institutional glossary terms from our definitions initiative along with a crowdsourced acronym dictionary. We have outlined a training framework and have begun

 

development of framework components. We are working with the vendor to obtain their digital accessibility roadmap in anticipation of applying for an exception until the tool becomes fully accessible. We have met with other data.world customers to gain insights from those who have more experience with the tool, including Cross River Bank, WPP and Harvard Business School. At our urging and that of other higher education customers, data.world is creating a higher education customer interest group.

 

Beginning last fiscal year, we developed an inclusive and participatory process to achieve approved definitions for key terms at the institutional level. We continued those efforts this year, although to a lesser extent due to our focus on the data catalog implementation. So far this fiscal year, we have published approved definitions for ten terms including legal sex and pronouns plus new first year student, transfer student and student ranks. Work is currently underway to assist the Medical Center to define employee population groups and to define “Learner” and related terms.

 

A key component to a successful data governance program is equipping your community to treat data appropriately. In a very broad sense, this means that data users take care to use data appropriately and ethically, use data only for approved business purposes and secure data according to its classification. We have partnered with the Privacy and Records Management to collect existing resources, both internal and external, to publish a website to provide guidance while we work to assess gaps and create custom training and resources to address those gaps.

 

In addition to our six areas of focus detailed above, we actively participate in the higher education data governance community both to share our progress and experience and to gain knowledge from others. We are members of the BTAA Data Governance group and the Educause Data Governance Community Group. We presented our Checklist and Reference guide tool in and Educause session on best practices for policies and tools. We presented at the recent Higher Education Data Warehouse (HEDW) conference on how to succeed in a decentralized environment. We shared our program origins and progress with a committee from the University of Illinois seeking to formalize data governance and have an upcoming meeting with the University of New Mexico following our presentation at HEDW. For fun and learning, we held a BTAA Data Governance trivia game session during Love Data Week in partnership with Penn State. We consulted with colleagues from the University of Wisconsin and Colby College who shared information on data literacy training programs.

 

Some of our data governance work falls outside of the six focus areas but results in key accomplishments.

 

Laura Gast, Data Governance Program Director

Amy Cogswell, Senior Data Governance Analyst