Education Policy, Business and Technology

Taming the Data for Better BI

Campus Technology: Facing tight budgets and long to-do lists, some CIOs decide that creating an infrastructure for managing and categorizing data is a low priority. But institutions such as Notre Dame (IN) and the University of Washington are recognizing that without a metadata repository and a strong data governance effort, business intelligence efforts are likely to fizzle out.

"We had a data warehousing initiative seven years ago that failed," admitted Chris Frederick, Notre Dame's business intelligence manager. A post-mortem placed the blame on data governance shortcomings. "We knew we had to get everyone on the same page," he said. So when the institution kicked off its new business intelligence effort, called dataND, data governance was positioned front and center. Notre Dame hired a campus data steward and put him in charge of creating a repository and getting business users to agree on terms.

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