The Problem.
A major public university medical school and hospital system faced a proliferation of data systems, each designed to serve individual parts of the institution. In an effort to simplify the disparate metadata strategies, security approaches, and project lifecycle decision benchmarks, the institution engaged a “big four” consulting firm to create a new Enterprise Analytics Roadmap. The CIO of the medical school engaged Neosynapse to evaluate their work.
The Solution.
Each part of the roadmap and all supporting documents were analyzed against the Data Management Association’s Body of Knowledge:
- Data quality
- Data architecture
- Data development
- Data warehousing
- Metadata
- Business intelligence
- Documents and content
- Database operations
- Data security
- Reference and Master data
Starting from this well-understood set of industry best-practices, important gaps were identified in all areas of the roadmap.
To provide a context for the medical school’s plan, Neosynapse also conducted qualitative interviews with CIOs of similar institutions. The findings from these interviews were used to highlight approaches by other experts in the field that could be replicated or transferred to the institution, and characterize the institution’s data governance maturity by examining comparable institutions.
The Benefit.
The institution is now in a position to proceed with an enterprise-wide development plan that conforms to comprehensive data governance standards. Particular advantages of the new plan include:
- Assuring security compliance for HIPAA-based medical information;
- Establishing foundations for greater control and use/re-use of both clinical and research data assets through well-defined reference data, master data, and metadata management strategies;
- Providing cost control for pilot systems and projects under development;
- Benchmarking approaches against similar institutions; and
- Serving as a model of data governance excellence for the broader academic institution.