Data Governance Council 2019-20 Annual Report
Approved September 10, 2020
Overview
Stony Brook’s data governance system was established in fall 2016 in order to improve
Stony Brook’s data infrastructure. The Data Governance Council (DGC) oversees the
data governance system, and began meeting in spring 2017. This is the third annual
report of the DGC. The suspension of on-campus activities due to COVID-19, departure
of the executive sponsors for data governance, and lack of dedicated personnel and
resources to support data governance significantly limited capacity to extend data
governance initiatives in 2019-20.
Major accomplishments
- Oversaw identification and implementation of 39 projects
- Complete: 5
- In progress: 13
- In queue: 21
- Data strategy advancements
- Identified next steps to develop University data asset inventory
- Prioritized Data Cookbook implementation
- Integrated data from the National Student Clearinghouse and Blackboard usage logs
into
the Data Warehouse - Developed online training for Tableau
Members 2019-20
Braden Hosch, Chair
Kim Berlin, Co-Chair
Ahmed Belazi
Diane Bello
Surita Bhatia
David Cyrille
Robert Davidson
Paula Di Pasquale-Alvarez
Lyle Gomes
Jim Gonzales
Stefan Hyman
Kate Larsen
Tracey McEachern
Nicholas Prewett
Theresa Diemer, ex officio
Challenges
The global COVID-19 pandemic prompted a suspension of on-campus activities in mid-March
2020. Even though remote meeting resources were available through Zoom, meetings of
the DGC and Functional Data Governance Committees (FDGCs) and related activities to
address specific data quality issues were suspended in order to conduct emergency
campus operations.
The executive sponsors of data governance – Matthew Whelan, Vice President for Strategic
Initiatives, and Melissa Woo, Senior Vice President for Information Technology and
CIO – both separated from Stony Brook University during the academic year, and their
transition out of the university limited the capacity to advance effective requests
for personnel and resources. Additionally, while the data governance framework places
the DGC under the purview of the Project 50 Forward Steering Committee, Project 50
Forward is no longer active, and data governance should be anchored by another executive
body.
Finally, because dedicated staffing and other resources have not been allocated to
advance data governance, progress on various initiatives has been limited.
Oversaw identification and implementation of 39 projects
The DGC identified 39 projects or issues for attention in 2019-20. Five of these have
been completed, 13 are in progress, and 21 are in the queue for 2020-21. The process
of identifying and prioritizing issues is ongoing. Completed projects include:
Tracking of Open Educational Resources (OER) in PeopleSoft for courses that primarily
use it for instructional course materials
- Adjusted headcounts of FSA employee from 2011 and prior due to a difference in how students were coded in the past. Student-employees that were previously coded as an employee have been reclassified as a student.
- Review of semantic information embedded in class section designators. The review determined that while a small fraction of class section indicators contain semantic information, this was not a significant problem. Institutionally, analysts should not interpret class section designations to convey specific meaning (online, SUNY Korea, etc.) but rather should use other fields to conduct such analyses.
- Addition of a term-based student-level SUTRA indicator (registered for exclusively SUTRA classes, registered exclusively for classes that are not SUTRA, registered for a mix of SUTRA classes and classes that are not SUTRA)
- Resolution of inconsistencies between citizenship and visa types for students
Completed projects will improve compliance efforts for financial modeling and budget
preparation as well as student-related compliance reporting.
In progress projects from 2019-20 are listed below
|
FDGC |
Project Name |
Category |
|
Finance HR |
Employee Citizenship |
Maintenance Issue |
|
|
Employee Education |
Maintenance Issue |
|
|
Faculty assignment by instruction, research, service |
Maintenance Issue |
|
|
Faculty Program Affiliation |
Maintenance Issue |
|
|
State Job Titles / Administrative Posts |
Data Quality Issue |
|
|
Tenure Panel |
Maintenance Issue |
|
Student |
Additional Baccalaureate (Re-opened Project ID #4) |
Maintenance Issue |
|
|
Address validation |
Data Quality Issue |
|
|
Citizenship management |
Maintenance Issue |
|
|
Micro credentials |
Maintenance Issue |
|
|
New Graduate Student |
Definition Issue |
|
|
Permanent Address for Students |
Maintenance Issue |
|
|
Residency |
Definition Issue |
Further development of data asset inventory
The DGC identified the next set of items to extend the data asset inventory. Collection
of these items was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Questions for part 2 of
the data asset inventory were structured around data acquisition, integration and
linkage, access and reporting.
|
Data acquisition |
Describe how data in this data asset are captured or acquired. (User input, Feed from another SBU system, Feed from an outside source, Manual upload, Other) |
|
Integration and linkage |
Data In: List systems or data sources that are fed into this data asset. What is the frequency of the data feed into this data asset? |
|
Access |
Describe how users are initially authorized to access this data asset. Describe how users authenticate when they connect to this data asset. Describe how users access the data from this data asset (e.g. web access, VPN, file share). |
|
Reporting |
Describe the standard method(s) of reporting for this data asset. (ex: PeopleSoft provides numerous on-board reporting features to provide users with data about individuals and a query function for batch reporting) |
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