Wanted: Forward Thinkers to Help Map Ohio State’s Digital Enterprise

The situation. Tim Cain , assistant director for knowledge management and digital strategies in the Center for Knowledge Management, says that the size of Ohio State and its decentralized nature means that the university maintains a de facto federation of ever-evolving but valuable and often disconnected data sets owned and managed by various campus entities. To make the federation effective, the university needs to better understand where these data sets reside and how they interact with each other so that gaps can be identified and redundancies eliminated.

The challenge. Getting a handle on a large university’s myriad data sets, both business and academic, can be quite daunting. But that doesn’t deter members of a campus group assembled by Cain to begin charting such a course. Their goal is a visual, contextual map of the university’s multiple digital assets. They call their project Mapping the Information Enterprise.

Representatives from the arts and sciences, libraries, architecture, archives, medical center, and the data warehouse are embarking on a campus wide study to develop and test methodologies that could be used to create a dynamic, comprehensive, and contextual map of the university’s information enterprise.

The short-term goal. The first step in his team’s project, says Cain, is conducting “an initial environmental scan of the university’s primary academic data assets,” which can be accomplished by contacting informants of key data sets that are strategically important to the university. The team will use the results from that assessment to inform its future work. The first phase then, is to begin the important groundwork of gathering information about the university’s key information assets through a 10-minute survey. “We’re hoping for 100 percent participation,” Cain enthuses.

The long-term goal. Ultimately, the group seeks a holistic view and a roadmap to the academic data sets and a better understanding of how they interact with business data (e.g., human resources and student information). Academic data sets, such as Carmen, the Knowledge Bank, and Media Manager, to name a few, function mostly independently of each other, says Cain. Their connections, if any, are elusive at this point.

When all the information is collected, the team can begin making connections to work toward its big-picture, long-term goal: to establish a dynamic, comprehensive, and contextual map of the university’s extensive information enterprise.

University Libraries Director Joseph Branin encourages the work of Cain and his team. “This is an interesting and important project,” he says. “The Library knows where the formal published information resides on campus, but the university doesn’t have a handle on where all the digital content originates. Mapping these sources would tell us a lot more about how best to organize support for storage, preservation, and sharing of important information at OSU."

The first step. Cain says the people they need to hear from now are the institutional stakeholders and data stewards in the campus community with knowledge of “authoritative data sets, flow patterns, and connection points” who understand how a big picture of the relationships among these assets would position Ohio State for continued success with its current and future information initiatives. Cain refers to them as informants who “get” the intrinsic value of making a concerted effort to identify “canonical data sets, systems of record, data flow patterns and reservoirs that contribute to the overall enterprise,” as described in the initiative’s prospectus.

Small contribution, big payoff. It is a challenge that appeals to visionaries. Even better, the first step takes precious little time and yet could produce great results that will enable the effort to move forward. The team hopes key informants will be stirred to join the early prototype testing by taking the 10-minute survey that will lay the groundwork upon which a larger study will be based.

You, as an institutional stakeholder or data steward, do not even need to make the first move. Just respond when you receive the invitation to the survey.