Page 10 - Campus Technology, January/February 2018

DATA ANALYTICS david raths Taming the Data for Better BI
The secret to successful business intelligence is data governance and a metadata repository that connects data to standardized definitions across the campus.
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.
Helping Users Navigate the Data
In 2015, the University of Washington began work on its own repository called the Knowledge Navigator, which is designed to give context to the enterprise data warehouse and allow business users to see relationships between concepts, terms, tables, columns and reports. “Someone who is exploring a business
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CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | January/February 2018
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