Data Governance Health Status Checks
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Data Governance Health Status Checks
In 2014, the City of Pittsburgh enacted an Open Data Ordinance (ODO), which required all departments to conduct high-quality data management practices, including the creation of an Open Data Catalog; designating departmental Open Data Coordinators to update and maintain the catalog; and submitting annual Open Data Reports. The city of Pittsburgh’s Data Services Team, which is part of the Department of Innovation and Performance (I&P), is responsible for supporting data governance and management for city departments. In 2020 the Data Services Team discovered that the city is not in compliance with the 2014 Open Data Ordinance and does not have procedures for prioritizing open data publication. To work toward compliance, the city’s Data Services Team from the Department of Innovation and Performance (I&P) planned data management engagement sessions to describe and discuss data management roles, responsibilities, and coordination.
For assistance in designing sustainable data governance practices with respect to the City of Pittsburgh’s Open Data Ordinance, the Data Services Team became a partner with the Library and Information Science department at the University of Pittsburgh School of Computing and Information. This meant a group of students enrolled in the Design Methods course sequence could be assigned to work with them to find and recommend solutions to their problem. Our group, DataTrackers, was assigned the task of working with the city to design Data Governance Health Status Checks to promote continuous updating of data inventories.
Our final product consists of the following major components:
Data Services Procedures
The Data Services Procedures provide step-by-step instructions for conducting Data Governance Health Status Checks. Users of this document should have a basic understanding of Pittsburgh’s Open Data Ordinance. These procedures provide a detailed breakdown of the steps involved in tracking progress toward compliance with the Open Data Ordinance, identifying data inventory records that need attention, and conducting Health Status Checks meetings.
Tracking and Summary Tables
The Tracking and Summary Tables reflect Pittsburgh city departments’ overall compliance with the Open Data Ordinance. They summarize city-wide and departmental participation in needs assessments and brainstorming sessions, progress with data inventorying and identifying top 10 Right to Know (RTK) requests, and other key metrics of the Open Data Ordinance. This component is accompanied by user documentation for the Data Services Team: User Guide: Tracking and Summary Tables, which describes the structure, variables, and values of each table and which tables and values to update.
Critical Records Program
The Critical Records Program is a Visual Basic macro designed to prevent data loss from data inventories. The macro discovers data inventory records that are overdue, due, or due soon for updates or that have missing, invalid, or illogical data. Reports will be shared by the Data Services Team at Data Governance Health Status Checks meetings. Basic computer skills are all that is required to run the program. Familiarity with Visual Basic for Applications or a reasonable comfort level with programming in general is required to modify the program. This component is accompanied by user documentation for the Data Services Team: User Guide: Critical Records Program.
Data Coordinator Procedures
The Data Coordinators Procedures describe the process of preparing for and participating in Data Governance Health Status Checks. This document is a summary of the steps necessary for data coordinators to complete and update data inventories and follow good data management practices, which are required for compliance with the Open Data Ordinance.
Prioritizing Data Publication
The Prioritizing Data Publication document provides information to assist data coordinators in establishing initial priorities for selecting datasets to add to the data inventory as well as for open data publication.
Health Status Checks Newsletter Template
The Health Status Checks Newsletter Template is a PowerPoint file with space for reporting progress to data coordinators and other stakeholders. The file can be edited as needed. This component is accompanied by user documentation for data coordinators: User Guide: Newsletter. The document provides an overview of the newsletter structure and describes the four major sections: ‘News,’ ‘Featured Department,’ ‘Summary Tables,’ and ‘Critical Records Tables.’ The subsequent components of the guide go into further detail for each newsletter section, including detailed descriptions of what the summary table values represent and how to interpret the critical records tables. A description for how Data Services selects a ‘Featured Department’ is also provided.
All documents listed above–Data Services Procedures, Data Coordinator Procedures, and Prioritizing Data Publication–and the user guides that accompany the other components are included in the Data Governance Health Status Checks Handbook, which is organized as follows:
- Data Services Procedures
- User Guide: Tracking and Summary Tables
- User Guide: Critical Records Program
Data Coordinator Artifacts:
- Data Coordinator Procedures
- Prioritizing Data Publication
- User Guide: Newsletter