The True State Of Data Integrity at Colleges and Universities

What is the true state of the data integrity? What do you and your organization base your decisions on? The other day, while working, a request came across for a relatively routine report that asked this basic question, How many tenured faculty members are at the University, what is their course load and when did they become tenured? This set off a massive chain reaction of 4 different departments at the University scrambling to come up with this basic information request. I began to research what we needed to do to fill this request. It became apparent to me that the data was located in several different locations. The course load was located in the administration system SunGard Banner. Tenured faculty dates were located in an access database on someone's desktop in HR, which included a few custom reports written by the person who set up the database 8 years ago.

The majority of the data in this access database was out of date. After determining the location of the data, we requested that human resource send a copy of their database over two institutional research. Institutional research began by extracting the data of tenured faculty and the dates that they receive tenure. At this point they sent the data back to the information technology office, which in turn ran a report using faculty ID's to take out the exact course load. At this point we sent the report back to the personnel division of human resources for cleanup. After human resources cleaned up the report they sent the report to the Office of the Provost where the Provost himself had to spend several hours deleting faculty that have retire or have not worked at the University in many years.

What is the true state of the data that you use to base your organization's decisions? An organization spends millions of dollars and hundreds of man-hours if not thousands of man-hours entering data into multiple systems spread around a campus. We never spend any true time or money on data verification or data integrity until a report is needed. It is not until then that we realize how fragmented and unreliable the data real is. It is upon the strength of this data, which is found to have an 85% accuracy rate or less, that we will make decisions that affect academic careers and spend millions of dollars in capital. We must seriously consider, as an organization, implementing massive data control and data integrity standards. Common sense? Perhaps. We must take a step back and look at all of the internal obstacles to a culture shift in which data integrity is paramount.

1) There must be within organization's infrastructure someone empowered to verify all data and to request corrections. "When a organization find something like diversity which becomes a primary focus you must put somebody in charge who's job depends upon the outcome" (Jack Welsh)

2) Strong data standards must be implemented and compliance to those standards must be demanded.

https://apointofthought.blogspot.com/2009/09/outline-electronic-standards-for-data.html

3) Reviews all of business processes must be performed periodically to ensure all data is entered correctly in timely.

4) The most difficult step in this process is building a consensus among all individual organizations at a college or university that use data. Most individual departments will oppose an outside source reviewing all of the data that they enter into the system.

5) The most impossible step of all is to come to a common consensus that a central database for all information must be maintained or integrated into departments. (this means you must get rid of all of your shadow databases in your Excel spreadsheets)

How many of you would buy a new car if the salesman told you he was only 85% sure it would run? How many of us would pay for a seat on a flight if we were told that there was 85% chance we would get to the other side? How many of us would have an operation if we were told there was only 85% chance we would wake up? How many of you would buy a $.99 toy for your child if you were told there was only at 85% chance that it was safe? As institutions of higher education we are willing to make decisions that could affect a person's life at the cost millions of dollars on the strength of data that has an accuracy rate of only 85%. What does this say about the integrity of educators and administrators?