Data Governance Council Minutes

Tuesday, May 30, 2023  11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.

CFT5, 2327 University Way, Room 228

Members Present: Ryan Knutson (co-chair), Chris Fastnow (co-chair), Camie Bechtold, Tony Campeau, Alison Harmon, Terry Leist, Eleazar Ortega, Alisha Schroeder, Justin van Almelo, Leslie Weldon

Non-Members Present: Miranda Bly (admin support), Joann Stryker, Brett Weisz, Nate Fromelt

  1. Welcome and introductions

  2. Approval of Minutes from May 30, 2023

    1. Minutes adopted without correction

  3. Discussion: reporting infrastructure

    1. Need (Chris Fastnow)
      1. We need to leverage data appropriately. We are required to report to the federal government and others regularly. We also report at the management level internally. 85% of the things we report on usually require the same standard report, but the other 15% is where we need flexibility.
      2. Confusion comes into play when we get a new analyst, a new department starts reporting, or a requestor asks different people for data. There are problems with using the production data base. Enterprise data system may not have all the info we need, and the information it has changes constantly.
    2. Existing models - description, advantages, disadvantages
      1. MSUB Student Data Warehouse (Joann Stryker and Brett Weisz)
        1. Joann presented a slide show on the topic.
        2. Billings created their own Data Governance Council two years ago right after Covid. They created their charter, which they patterned after 20-30 samples they looked at. A copy of the charter is attached to these minutes.
        3. They also created a Data Governance Council project review workflow that loops in the Vice Chancellor for the department that is implementing the integration. Requests are submitted through DocuSign.
        4. Brett agreed to share his workflow and request form with this group, so both are attached to these minutes. He plans to update the form to require the sponsoring Vice Chancellor to sign as well.
        5. They use the Banner security classes to determine what people can access in reports.
      2. Data Mart (Nate Fromelt)
        1. Was developed by ESG.
        2. Is a four-campus data set.
        3. Anyone with reporting access in Banner can access the Data Mart.
        4. It also contains high-level DegreeWorks data.
        5. Question: Are any integrations too big to use the Data Mart? Answer: Any integration ESG controls uses the Data Mart. It may need other data from other sources as well.
        6. ESG refreshes this data for all current students on a nightly basis. Data on former students is updated less often. They also have end-of-term snapshots but not census snapshots.
        7. Per Tony, the Registrar can now run a report from this rather than going into DegreeWorks to look at each student’s record. This is cutting down their auditing time down by a lot.
      3. OCHE MUS Data Warehouse (Chris Fastnow, briefly)
        1. Nightly populated from Banner with student, finance, and HR data from all MUS campuses. OCHE would like to standardize this data between campuses.
        2. They have census and end-of-term snapshots.
        3. OCHE and BOR’s data resources.
        4. We use it for term-related reporting foundationally, but we also draw from other data sources.
        5. They also feed data to the Student National Clearinghouse as part of the Post-secondary Data Partnership.
        6. We do not have the authority to change data or ask for them to add data that we need.
    3. Questions and alternatives for potential task force
      1. Are there some approaches we need to think about that are more comprehensive or faster?
      2. Ryan’s goal for the group is to digest what we heard today and decide what role we want to have in decisions. Do we want to take a more formal approach?
      3. Chris: Should there be a more unified comprehensive approach, or do we want to leave our system as is?
      4. Tony feels like the scope of this requires a greater understanding by the council. He loves the standardization, but he also likes flexibility. He wants the enterprise approach to have both.
      5. Terry: Finance reporting is more clear cut. HR is the big one for him as far as defining how we look at data. If we can make the HR reporting more detailed going forward (like including turnover information), it would be helpful to MSU.
      6. Ryan: The institute that can leverage their data is going to have a competitive edge over the others. What do you want your Data Governance Council doing? There will be approval of data requests, but do we drive what our environment looks like in the future?

  4. Other business

    1. External Vendors' Cyberattack update (Ryan Knutson)
      1. The National Student Clearinghouse has given UM official notification of their data being included in the clearinghouse breach.
      2. Justin: Billings was notified that some FERPA data was compromised but not PII data, so there is no notification required other than a note in the file. MSU, Northern, and GFCMSU have not received notification letters yet.
      3. TIAA and Delta Dental were also affected by the same attack.
      4. Tony added that he just got our notification while he was in this meeting, and MSU only had a small amount of FERPA data and no PII data involved.
    2. PII clean-up (Ryan Knutson) (postponed)
    3. New business
      1. None

  5. Next meeting

    1. Data Governance Council's role in MSU's data landscape
      1. The three examples above are just examples. There are other examples we didn’t cover today.
      2. Think about the persistence it will take to start down a particular journey toward the goal. Think of this as a program.

  6. Public Comment

    1. None

The meeting concluded at 12 pm.

 

Download PDF Alternative Here