| | November 20169In a short period of time, following the steps outlined below, the GW Division of IT built a very successful Business Intelligence and Data Governance program resulting in 22+ robust dashboards used daily by top university leaders (such as the Provost, Deans, Executive Vice President & Treasurer, division heads, finance directors, HR and other leaders) to make accurate, timely and informed decisions about our university’s day-to-day operations and future direction. Today, the GW BI and Data Governance program is recognized as an industry best practice. The Education Advisory Board wrote about thepractice in several of their publications, and GW is frequently asked to speak about our program at EDUCAUSE, Data Citizen’s Conference, Chief Data Officers Conference, Informatica World and most recently,the MIT Data Conference. The value of data governance and data quality is critical to the success of the BI program. Without well-understood, high quality data, BI insights cannot be trusted and successfully used. Before universities and colleges can use the vast amount of information they have to effectively drive their business, they have to “make data transparent so it can be trusted.” (This is the GW data governance definition and GW data governance program tag line). Data governance (and data quality) becomes an integral part of all critical data management processes ensuring the right people are involved in making decisions about data definitions, quality and use. Coupled with disciplined data integration/warehousing and powerful visualization and analytics technologies, GW’s Division of IT Business Intelligence program is enabling the university to use its data to effectively drive business.Here are steps GW took to get to this level:[1] Start by putting in place data governance processes, people and technology to make data transparent and trusted. [2] Put university-wide BI governance in place to help guide university business intelligence priorities.[3] Next, starting with the business’s most important and value add problems, begin integrating data that the business needs to make important, effective and actionable decisions into a single trusted source – the university data warehouse. Use an iterative, agile scrum approach to incrementally deliver on the most important university data needs.[4] Introduce a standard set of BI technologies (GW uses Tableau and IBM Cognos), and build a shared community across all business functions for self-service BI. Thiswill help scale delivery of BI solutions beyond the core BI team.[5] Adopt agile scrum to improve delivery speed and relevancy of BI solutions to the business. Changing role of CIOThe role of the CIO has changed to become more of visionary and strategist at the university level instead of just information and technology. As universities continue to automate and rely on data to plan and make decisions, the CIO role will become even more essential to the strategic planning process in the future. CIOs will also become more involved in vendor and contract management. As more services move to cloud solutions, strong relationships and partnerships with the vendor is going to be important to the university. The contracts will need to be written to protect the university, as well as ensure rates do not rise to a level where cloud services become unaffordable. The CIO will also have to ensure there is an exit strategy in the plan and contract. The makeup of the organization that a CIO leads today will also change as higher education relies more on cloud services. Prepare, protect and mobilize data is one of the three strategic themes of the GW Division of Information Technology 2021 Strategic Plan
< Page 8 | Page 10 >