“Data governance (DG) refers to the overall management of the availability, usability, integrity, and security of the data employed in an enterprise. A sound data governance program includes a governing body or council, a defined set of procedures, and a plan to execute those procedures.” This operational definition, by Margaret Rouse, captures what data governance is all about. I think it is fair to say that in most of Higher Ed, access to data is far less than optimal. The reasons for this are varied.

In “Choosing Governance Models” , Gwen Thomas outlines some of the important things to consider when it comes to data governance.

• Top-down
• Bottom-up
• Center-out, or
• Silo-in

This will provide a window into why access to reliable data in a secure way is a huge issue in higher ed. First and foremost, until recently we have not had any formal governance structures. In many cases, it has been bottom up, decisions were taken in data silos and no one was willing to disturb the status quo. These have resulted in incoherent policies, over control of data and in some cases misinterpretation of the laws governing data. In general there are a lot of users in the institution complaining about problems and not many who are interested in participating in finding a solution.

In my opinion, the best chance that we have for success in this area needs to come from a hybrid model. We need a top down governance structure to signal that data integrity and access models are being taken seriously by the senior administration. It is also extremely useful to have the support of this group to enforce policies and data security.

However, it is not practical to assume that this group is likely to have deep knowledge of all the different data elements in multiple data sources and the business processes needed to maintain them. This is where the bottom up and the center-out models come in handy. As Gwen explains, these cannot succeed without an active top down structure in place.

We at Wellesley have been approaching data governance in ways that somewhat resembles this. When we implemented the student and finance data warehouse, we constituted a governance committee consisting of senior administrators and an “implementation team” consisting of functional and technical experts familiar with the business processes. The implementation team helped shape the data integrity and integration issues, but when it came to decision making, such as “what criteria to use to define a full time student” or “Should we apply the current fund-org security for finance data in the ERP to the data warehouse”, it was escalated to the governance committee.

Such discussions in the governance committee always included experts from the implementation committee, who were invited to join on an as needed basis. As you can imagine, sometimes these discussions can be less productive because of linguistic differences between the senior administrators and the data experts, so moderating these discussions becomes extremely important.

We are currently going through a similar exercise. In order for us to succeed, it is critically important to convey to the governance committee that the most practical use of their time and effort is to help us set governance at a higher level of abstraction and not get too much into details. For example, discussion at this level should define classes of data such as “Student biographic data”, “Academic History”, “Budget”, “Alumnae Gifts” and functional roles such as “Student Life Senior Staff”, “Finance – Controllers Office Staff” etc.

This will then be further expanded by the “implementors” who will get into the nitty gritty details of what should be in “student biographic data” and whether the level of granularity such as “Controller’s Office Staff” is enough. A few of these will require further clarification from the governance committee. Such a feedback loop will help make the data access model practical and easy to implement and most importantly easy to comprehend by all those involved. Hopefully, it will be far better than “form BCFGXY is accessible by person A, person B” etc.

The other thing we need to realize is that these need to be periodically examined and tweaked. Since the players in these committees change, keeping it simple and comprehensible is essential.

Of course, I realize that this is easer said than done. That is not stopping us from trying 🙂