UCISA CISG Stuff

Alison Allden from HESA uses a storytelling metaphor for information management.

The holy grail?

• Single sign-on
• Interoperability
• One data collection
• Shared data definition
• Data quality
• Adoption of standards
• Search, find and report

Not a bad collection of goals I’d say… how we get there is a little more tricky I guess.

And the villains of the piece:

• Wrong data
• Multiple systems
• Overhead of standards (XML etc)
• Exceptions (20:80)
• Variations
• Cost-benefit analysis.
• The trough of despair

I think, for us… the cost benefit side is the really tricky one.  It’s hard to make the case for serious information management efforts as making benefits concrete, in terms of cost savings or benefit realisation.  They’re ellusive to pin down and nobody in accounts ever wants to hear “we’ll save a lot of money but we don’t know how much”.

The Heroes?

• UCISA (thanks Alison )
• Leaders and Champions
• Business Analysts and Project Managers
• JISC
• HESA/hedii/ISB/Shared Services

HESA’s Role?

Shared conceptualisation and definition of data as well as enforcement of data quality.  Credibility checking  is a critical factor in their quality regime alongside more traditional validation/verification.

Credibility checking is one of those areas where I feel that many IT systems might make more efforts.  Validation and verification are generally more heavily used with questions being “Can this be correct?” and “Are you sure this is correct?”.  We could certainly ask “Is this likely to be correct?” a lot more and I suspect that doing so would improve our data quality a great deal.

Who knows the ISB?

Surprisingly the majority of delegates don’t know anything about the Information Standards Board.  I expected a lot more people to be familiar with them but I guess that pre-HE is much more effected by them than we are.  UCISA involved with them, of course, and I guess that data standards are never going to be popular – too many toes trod upon.

Of course, the one thing that just about everyone has heard about – the ISB’s current start turn is the Unique Learner Number (ULN) and that has drawn a lot of (mostly unwarranted) criticism from people jaded with the proliferation of student identification numbers.  It would be great if it were to become the student number but most folks, including this blogger, doesn’t really believe that will happen.  But, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive for it.  We’ll never get a common student ID number if we don’t try.

Information Lifecycle

Allison, along with most other folks talking about this in HE, is pushing JISC’s season metaphor for information lifecycle:

• Spring: Creation
• Summer: Active Use
• Autumn: Semi-active Use (archives etc)
• Winter: Final Outcome (deletion/preservation)

It’s a great metaphor and you’ll see me using it a lot more   I’ve been using it to try and map out user accounts and their lifecycle.  I wonder how the lifecycle applies to a CISG conference…

Q & A

An important point added under Q&A is that information also requires interpretation and the people making use of high-level data are not always skilled at doing so.  Consequently there are barrier put in place between the information and the potential users of it – especially when those potential users are very senior and in a position to make big, snap decisions on the basis of their (mis)understanding of the information.

Information translators needed?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 at 4:16 pm and is filed under Session Report. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.