Provision
Data provision is about enabling data to be packaged and made available from various sources across the University, working within access guidelines.
Data provisioning matures from ‘ad hoc’ to ‘innovative’ through five stages - Ad hoc, Siloed, Coordinated, Centralised, Innovative.
| Stage 1 – | Ad hoc: there is no standard framework in place |
| Stage 2 – | Siloed: data provisioning is controlled at faculty/service/team level and is not coordinated across the organisation |
| Stage 3 – | Coordinated: data provisioning occurs across the organisation, regardless of which faculty/service/team owns or consumes the data |
| Stage 4 – | Centralised: data protection, governance and accountability are directly built into the data provisioning process |
| Stage 5 – | Innovative: data provisioning process is a business enabler |
Data is often shared at the convenience of the source system’s developers, accessible only through database queries or as a series of files. There is little uniformity across systems or subject areas, and usage requires programming- level skills. Non-programming users need data that is uniformly formatted so that it can filter easily into their analysis activities. The University has teams of varying levels of maturity according to the definitions above, but many are still at Stage 1 or Stage 2. In order to move towards Stage 5, we must identify data-sharing needs across the University and develop the methods, practices and tooling needed to standardise data provision.