Roles and Responsibilities

No one person, department, division, school, or group “owns” Institutional Data, even though specific units bear responsibility for certain data.  The following roles establish clear lines of accountability.

  • Data Trustees - Data trustees are institutional officers, (i.e. Vice Presidents, Vice Provosts, Deans, etc.) who have authority over policies and procedures regarding business definitions of data, and the access and usage of that data, within their delegations of authority. Each data trustee appoints data stewards for their specific subject area domains.
  • Data Stewards - Data stewards are university business officials responsible for the direct operational-level management of one or more types of Institutional Data and have authority to make decisions.
  • Data Custodians - Data custodians are system administrators responsible for the operation and management of systems and servers that collect, manage, and provide access to Institutional Data.
  • Data Consumers - Data consumers are university units or individual university community members who have been granted access to Institutional Data in order to perform assigned duties or in fulfillment of assigned roles or functions within the university. This access is granted solely for the conduct of legitimate university business.   Examples of legitimate  purposes include:
    • Standard Reporting to support Business Need
    • Cross Data Domain Reporting requiring data from multiple data domains. Nonstandard reporting requires a data sharing agreement.
    • Power Users whose skills and subject area expertise are more advanced
    • Modeling & Analytics - Data modeling deals with the planning of the structure and flow of data, whereas Data Analytics deals with gaining insights to shape the decisions of the organization.
data consumer characteristics table