What would UW-Madison do if one of its buildings were no longer accessible or usable? Who on campus is responsible for ensuring the proper use of our physical assets such as Bascom Hall?
In the same vein, data at UW-Madison should be treated as an “enterprise asset”—an institution-wide concern with real and/or potential value. While many functional offices across campus are responsible for collecting, processing, storing, retrieving, and reporting data, our data should not be held in silos but should be shared across departments for its value to be fully realized.
Types of Data
We can think of the created, collected and used at UW-Madison in one of three differing ‘types’ of data:
Administrative Data: Data that is generated as a result of utilizing enterprise transactional systems, such as student records, employee data, financial information
Local Data: Data that is captured across campus and isn’t integrated or accessible to the enterprise systems and is needed to create holistic view of the student life cycle.
Research Data: That data which is created as part of a research study.
Regardless of data type, the Chief Data Officer in collaboration with others across campus is looking at how to best manage our institution’s data through:
- Data Governance to properly secure and provide appropriate access to our data
- Provide the appropriate tools with which to access our data
- Create best practices and standards to follow when using our data