NEWS & ANNOUNCEMENTS

What’s Cooking in the Data Cookbook?

In the past few months, the Metadata Management team concentrated on adding new content to the Data Cookbook to provide the reporting community with helpful context for the university’s data assets. A key addition to the team, Jacqueline Moore is the newest Data Governance Analyst and she has assumed responsibility for the university’s metadata repositories, including the Cookbook.  A sampling of the initiatives underway includes:

Research Billing

The team is reviewing a list of 68 new definitions with Chelsea Dean of Research Finance which will be added to the specifications for seven new reports produced by her area.  To support the effort, new workflows for both definitions and specifications were created to ensure that Chelsea and her group can review and approve the definitions and reports in a timely fashion.

Hybrid Budget Management

In February, the team met with Danielle Khoury, Assistant VP – Budget and Finance, old friend of Data Administration Dana Ritter, Associate Director – Budget and Finance, and Junnie Ngan, Senior Financial Analyst, along with May Fox from the BI team to review the specification for HBM0001 – 2023.  For those who have not yet had the pleasure of perusing this specification, it is the most complex report in the Cookbook with generations of definitions and scads of spreadsheets to provide explanation and context for the content.  During the session, we received excellent feedback on the specification and did some real-time editing to improve the user experience.  After some homework is completed by the Budget and Finance group, the specification will be submitted to the recently added HBM workflow for approval.

Data Cookbook Usage

Our Graduate Student, Unnati Ghodki, asked if she could work on Tableau visualizations while she was on our team and, figuring she could use a challenge, we asked her to provide some for the Data Cookbook.  Time and space constraints prevent me from showing all of her good work, but this graphic provides some insight into users’ interactions with the Cookbook.