Data governance is a set of practices and principles that serve a strategic and essential business function that drives the way institutions manage their data. The purpose of data governance is to provide an effective system of oversight that ensures accurate and reliable data, technical interoperability, and a common informed mindset that values data as an institutional asset. It also plays a significant role in providing and enhancing security, access control, and appropriate use, aligned with Penn State’s mission and values.
Data governance at Penn State is a work in progress and builds on previous work around analytics and business intelligence. Karen Henninger, director of data governance, is guiding the development of this important program. In many ways, individuals across the University are already doing data governance work in roles that simply need to be formalized.
The vision for data governance within the Office of Planning, Assessment, and Institutional Research (OPAIR) is to build trust in the data, unlock the data, and empower the University through people, processes, and technology. The goal is to make data available, evaluate its quality, and ensure users understand how it can be utilized. Through a holistic approach to data management and utilization, data governance provides processes that allow issues to be reported and resolved, as well as assess the limitations of data sets.
Before being moved to OPAIR, data governance initiatives worked with outside consultants to develop the vision and strategy for the framework of a policy for data governance at Penn State. Currently, the data governance team is working with stakeholders across the University to develop policy as a foundation for best practices.
The policy primarily focuses on the establishment of a data governance committee, identification and training of data trustees, data custodians, and data stewards, and finalizing a set of data domains. These new implementations will allow the team to better support the efforts and projects of the University community with their data responsibility, integrity, availability, and protection. Data governance’s director, Karen Henninger, recently finished the final feedback collection phase and completed focus group work late last semester.
Along with the new policy, the team is working on a data governance web presence, and a proof-of-concept data dictionary for the forthcoming Institutional Data Repository (IDR). This dictionary will provide important information about the data in the IDR and assess Informatica’s Cloud Data Governance and Catalog as a potential long-term tool, which will allow users to more efficiently access and understand information from the IDR.
For more information on data governance at Penn State, contact psudata@psu.edu.