Why we need this project

There are teams in the University doing excellent work with data. However there are many issues with the way we collect, manage, analyse and report on our data:

• Some colleagues are held back by reporting that takes a long time and doesn’t always produce accurate information.
• Our data are held in many different systems and teams across the University. It’s not always clear who 'owns' the data and some of it is not kept up-to-date. It is difficult to share, compare and identify any inaccuracies in our data.
• Colleagues spend lots of time collecting data from different teams or systems, manually updating or transferring data, finding workarounds to address issues with data quality, or creating their own reports.
• There is no central directory of all our available data, so different teams are repeating work and not co-ordinating.
• Data are published with no standard definitions or naming, making datasets and reports difficult to understand.
• Lots of reports are not updated with our live data, so teams are working from out-of-date information.

We want to give colleagues better training and access to systems like Power BI, and knowledge about how they could make better use of data in their area.