New Data Administration Tools: SharePoint lists and Data Quality Audits

If you interact with Data Administration at all you’ve probably heard about some of our efforts to wrangle data and improve access.

One of those tools, a staple of our SharePoint site, is the User Acceptance Testing tracker system. When the DA team undertakes new projects, working with the Business Intelligence Team in ITS or clients around the university, we use a dedicated SharePoint list to keep track of the items being worked on. If you’re not too familiar with “modern” SharePoint, you may not know how useful lists are. It’s easy to add items, sort, and update. And a user favorite: annotations. Annotations in the lists can also be used to tag collaborators using the standard @name formulation. Then SharePoint will send a notification to that person to loop them into the project.

Data Administration is also working on Phase 2 of the Data Quality Program. With an upgrade to the Data Cookbook, we are now beginning to roll out customized audits to monitor data. So far, the Cookbook server has been connected to the ODS and to a limited SnowFlake view containing Teaching & Learning data. There is a lot more to come this year as we begin to prep the auditing capability and catch errors before the relevant freeze happens.