Many colleges and universities find it difficult to empower their leaders to make data-informed decisions, which can be due to lackluster data governance efforts. Even when data governance initiatives are created, they can easily lose momentum. Committees often struggle to find the right combination of attendees, with both over-inclusiveness and under-inclusiveness resulting in failed data governance efforts.
Often, defining data can be an especially tricky challenge for schools. Definitions for certain terms like "student" or "section fill rate" may vary between different departments. These inconsistencies can make it difficult for leaders to gain valuable, actionable insight from institution-wide data.
This resource is part of the Establish Sustainable Data Governance Roadmap. Access the Roadmap for stepwise guidance with additional tools and research.
The University of Notre Dame solved these problems by creating an opt-in data governance committee structure and assigning four different decision rights to each committee member. Watch the video to learn how they created an efficient decision process for data definitions, defining twice as many terms in half the time as other schools.