ECAR Study: Institutional Data Management in Higher Education

The EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research (ECAR) has issued a new report, Institutional Data Management in Higher Education, based on a previous survey. It should be of interest to planners and others who collect, manipulate, analyze, or use institutional data for decision making. If your campus is an ECAR subscriber, you should be able to download the entire report. Even if not, you can access the Table of Contents, Key Findings, Roadmap, and the Survey Instrument. ECAR describes the report in this way:

This 2009 ECAR study of institutional data management examines the policies and practices by which higher education institutions effectively collect, protect, and use digital information assets to meet academic and business needs. Importantly, it also explores the impact of the "data big bang" on colleges and universities and the way information technology (IT) organizations deal with it. While the overall guiding concept is data management, the definition of data management that informs this study refers broadly to information assets in digital form. The study takes a multipart approach that includes a literature review to examine data management frameworks and definitions and to define issues and establish research questions; consultation with higher education IT administrators and data management experts to identify and validate survey questions; a quantitative web-based survey of EDUCAUSE member institutions that received 309 responses, 78% of which were from the institution CIO or equivalent; qualitative interviews with 23 higher education IT leaders and staff; and two case studies, one examining a sensitive data risk reduction initiative at the University of Virginia, and one concerning Chronopolis, a multi-institutional grid-based project for the long-term preservation of research data.

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Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring:

• March 14–16: Baltimore, MD
• March 24–26: Cambridge, MA
• April 5–7, San Diego, CA

'Flowing Data': Strength in Numbers

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SCUP's newest book is A Guide to Planning for Change by Donald M. Norris and Nick L. Poulton. In it they address data analysis and reporting in support of decision making, and speak of what they call "analytics for the masses," meaning "A new generation of tools supporting analytics and alignment enables planners and strategists to rigorously measure, assess, and refine their strategies throughout cascading cycles of expeditionary execution. These analytics are not just for so-called 'power users,' but for all administrators, faculty, and staff." (p. 32)

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Many kinds of SCUPers are interested in data: collecting it, analyzing it, displaying it, using it for decision making. Flowing Data is a website devoted to cool ways of reporting and using data - data visualization. Browsing in here you can get glimpses of what a future life with more and more information analytics will be like. Many people post here. The owner describes it to newbies this was:

The greatest value of a picture is when it forces us to notice what we never expected to see. If you're new here, welcome to FlowingData. A good place to start is the archives where you'll find FlowingData's most popular posts or take a look at the FlowingData beginner's guide. If you like what you see, subscribe to the feed. It'll only cost $1 million to do so. Yes, I'm totally serious. Really - which makes me a trillionaire.