Data Infrastructure Audit for Higher Ed
Assess your institution’s data infrastructure and receive a practical roadmap to improve data access, quality, governance, and trust.
EAB’s Data Infrastructure Audit helps senior leaders at colleges and universities assess the organizational, governance, and technical conditions that shape their data environment. Through surveys, stakeholder focus groups, and review of institutional policies and documentation, EAB identifies where your data practices support strategic insight and where gaps in access, quality, governance, skills, structure, or trust create bottlenecks and blind spots.
Build a stronger foundation for data-informed strategy
Whether your institution is trying to improve student success, manage financial risk, support research growth, or plan academic offerings, your data must be reliable, timely, and actionable. Even campuses with strong data strategies can struggle to act when data is hard to access, inconsistently defined, manually maintained, or viewed with skepticism.
The Data Infrastructure Audit is more than a technology assessment. It gives presidents, provosts, chief information officers, finance leaders, strategy leaders, and IT teams a shared view of their data landscape and the practical next steps needed to improve governance, strengthen reporting capacity, and support more confident decision-making.
What you’ll get from the audit
EAB evaluates foundational components of your data environment—including data access, quality, governance, vision alignment, organizational trust, and reporting capacity—and translates findings into a customized assessment and roadmap tailored to your institution’s structure, goals, and current data maturity.
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Current-state and maturity assessment
A comprehensive analysis of your institution’s data management strengths, weaknesses, maturity level, and barriers to effective decision-making
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Best-practice-informed recommendations
Customized guidance to improve data governance, access, quality, reporting capacity, data literacy, and campuswide trust
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Prioritized implementation roadmap
A tailored report and final debrief that sequence next steps based on your institution’s goals, readiness, and opportunities for continued support
How EAB conducts the audit
EAB delivers the Data Infrastructure Audit over 10–12 weeks, using a structured process to assess your institution’s data environment from multiple angles—not just systems, but also governance practices, reporting workflows, stakeholder trust, and organizational readiness.
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Plan and prepare
EAB works with institutional leaders to define goals, confirm scope, finalize survey questions, and identify survey recipients.
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Establish your baseline
EAB deploys and analyzes a campuswide survey, reviews relevant policies and documentation, and gathers stakeholder input through focus groups or interviews.
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Deliver recommendations and next steps
EAB synthesizes survey results, stakeholder insights, institutional context, and higher ed best practices into a tailored report, final debrief, and roadmap for continued progress.
Ready to assess your data infrastructure?
Partners who engage in our Comprehensive Strategic Advisory Services partnership can request a Data Infrastructure Audit to identify data management gaps and build a roadmap for stronger decision-making. To request this audit for your institution, log in and fill out the form below. If you have questions, reach out to [email protected] or your Strategic Leader.
If you are not yet a partner, learn more about Strategic Advisory Services.