Melinda Roy
If you’ve been following along with the Data Governance and Data Literacy skills by employee role (or catch up starting here), you’ll already know why data governance is everyone’s business, and what each area can bring to governance planning. Data governance strategy books and articles talk about governance roles, but the appropriate assignment of those roles isn’t always clear in a higher education setting.
Starting with data governance can be intimidating. Siloed data, communication disconnects, and undocumented processes are symptoms that your institution might need data governance, but bringing the necessary people together to create a data governance plan to address those issues can seem daunting. The good news is that data governance is already happening at your institution, whether or not you have an explicit framework. As Bob Seiner, non-invasive data governance expert puts it, your “Data stewards are already in the building,” you just need to know where. Part of data governance implementation, whether formal or non-invasive in approach, is figuring out where current accountability and responsibility for specific data governance roles lies. We offer the following guide to help you know where to look for whom.
Depending on the size and structure of your organization, titles may be different than what we’ve used, and the folks doing data custodian and communication work may be in positions where you don’t expect. And different data governance strategies may have additional roles or use different titles to reflect nuance specifically necessary to their institution, goals, or sector.
Data Governance Leadership (Individual or Committee): Director/Manager of Data Governance, Data Trustee, Owner, Council, or Committee
Data Trustees are involved in strategic planning and leadership, likely at the vice-executive level. The Data Trustee or Sponsor may be in a peer-level or oversight role to the Strategic Enrolment Planner. These roles make up the committee that prioritize, decide and assign work to the Domain Representatives, Data Administrators, while also being the primary data consumers. Involved in strategic planning, they rely on data for decision-making but do not require an in-depth level of understanding of the nuance of the processes of data transformation. They may not be able to identify in their institutions who the subject matter experts are, who the analysts are, or who is responsible for entering what data, yet be the primary data requestors of the institution. If you’re looking to get data governance started at your institution and aren’t a data analyst, you’re likely in this group.
Employee Titles: Director, (Associate) Vice President, Registrar, Dean, Chief Information Officer, Chief Data Officer, Provost
Data Governance Domain Representatives: Data Stewards, Subject Matter Experts
Some data governance frameworks differentiate between Stewards and Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), while others group SMEs with Data Custodians. Assignment of these roles can vary based on personality and passion of the individuals in your institution. But a Data Governance Domain Representative is ultimately responsible for communication between the Data Governance Leadership and other Data Governance roles and users. They act as translator, advocate, and cross-domain collaborators, and are responsible for defining and implementing policy and processes in their own domain.
If a senior data analyst is a good communicator and has positive relationships with their peers in other domains, they may be well suited to act as a Data Steward though in their daily job they perform Data Custodian duties. Where an Officer may be an obvious choice to assign to a Data Steward role, as they may already oversee a number of employees, they may be better as a SME if they have worked their way up from a front-facing position to their current role. In small institutions, the Data Steward, SME and Custodian role may be amalgamated into one role and assigned to the domain expert, likely a data analyst in a small institutional research office.
Domain Representatives, especially Data Stewards are important to identify early on. Data Stewards are likely to have strong opinions based on experiences unique to their offices data and the issues they see every day. Data Stewards ensure the policies and processes of data use in their areas are executed, coordinated, and issues communicated from their subject matter experts to the Data Trustees or Data Committee. They are identifiable as the initial point of contact for SMEs when a problem arises and collaborate with their peer roles in other departments to find solutions that work for everyone. When SMEs and Data Stewards are the same person, they will not only have a deep understanding of the data but also a level of independence or self-direction in their day-to-day work.
Employee Titles: Analyst, Officer, Manager, Program Coordinator, Project Lead, Administrator/Advisor/Specialist (Enrolment, Admissions, Benefits, Payroll)
Data Administrators and Custodians: Database Administrators, Data Architect, Data Management Teams
Data custodians can be responsible for a variety of duties, again depending on the organizational structure of the institution. Their duties can include managing access to data dashboard tools, cleaning raw data, managing data flows, creating datasets for analysis, as well as data administration, security, and lifecycle management of data lakes, warehouses, and databases in accordance with the policies maintained by the Data Stewards. Custodians will collaborate with Stewards on data quality management strategies, dataset development, and user access.
Employee Titles: Database Administrator, IT Manager, Analyst, Data Architect,
Data Consumers: Data End-users, Decision-makers, Data-curious
Almost all employees in higher education are data users, whether they use data to make executive-level decisions, schedule appointments, recruit students, or research student satisfaction. Data consumers are those who primarily view and apply data analysis to decisions. Data consumers may also hold one of the other roles,
Data Governance First Steps:
By bringing together your Data Stewards (and a few subject-matter experts) to talk about the concerns of each area can result in quick wins for data governance. By creating a dedicated time to discuss issues that cross domains, clarify and align processes, a burgeoning data governance program can relieve some long-standing data frustrations that have occurred between different reporting units, and use these wins to build trust and promote the data governance process to the more resistant offices. Developing a data glossary and tracking data lineage visually, with tools like Plaid Govern, can help teams understand the interconnectedness of their processes, help leadership understand the challenges of data management, data stewards identify disconnects in process, and inform collaborative development of definitions and use.
Strengthen Data Governance with Plaid Govern
Plaid Govern empowers institutions to streamline data governance, document data terminology and use to support evidence-based decision-making across campus. Plaid Govern is a cloud-based metadata management tool that centralizes data definitions, clarifies data lineage, and simplifies impact analysis. With it's automated metadata ingestion, easy-to-navigate interface, and support of common campus and vendor systems in higher education, Plaid Govern simplifies complex data ecosystems and promotes data literacy across campus.
Learn With Us: Data Governance Workshops
Ready to bring data governance learning to your institution? Our data governance workshops dispel the myth that data governance is just an Information Technology or Institutional Research responsibility, helping all participants see data as a business asset and a key component to the success in their own roles and departments for improving student experiences and outcomes at your institution.
References & Resources:
University of Toronto, University of Victoria, University of Waterloo, University of Alberta
https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatamanagement/definition/data-governance