{"id":1534,"date":"2025-05-01T05:55:10","date_gmt":"2025-05-01T10:55:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/irp\/?p=1534"},"modified":"2025-05-01T05:55:10","modified_gmt":"2025-05-01T10:55:10","slug":"databasin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/irp\/2025\/05\/01\/databasin\/","title":{"rendered":"Digging Deeper: From Data Stories to a Data Basin"},"content":{"rendered":"

Next Wednesday, our office will be hosting our second annual Data Literacy Session<\/strong>\u2014a chance to step back and reflect on how far we\u2019ve come in making data more accessible, usable, and impactful across campus. The session entitled \u201cFacts Decoded II: Exploring our University’s Data\u201d will build upon last year\u2019s session focused on unlocking the stories in our data.\u00a0 This year, we hope to add more chapters.<\/p>\n

Since the last blog post, a lot has happened behind the scenes in Institutional Research and Planning. One of the most exciting developments is the launch of our IR data lake<\/strong>\u2014though I\u2019ll be the first to admit, it\u2019s still more of a basin<\/em> right now. But it\u2019s deep enough to hold over a decade of student, course, section, instructor assignment, and employee data in a flatter, more efficient format than Banner\u2019s 1500+ tables.<\/p>\n

And yes\u2014there are<\/em> benefits. This structure has made it faster and more intuitive to power our reporting workflows, especially in PowerBI<\/strong>. With cleaner joins and fewer transformations needed, the data lake is helping us shift from reactive reports to proactive insights. It\u2019s also the backbone for how we\u2019re aligning SQL for the heavy lifting, Excel for quick checks, and PowerBI for final delivery\u2014each tool playing to its strength.<\/p>\n

To keep us aligned, we\u2019ve started documenting what data lives where and how it flows.\u00a0 We are starting small with an Excel document that \u201cdocuments\u201d each of our nightly processes and what it places where. It\u2019s a small but important step toward ensuring we\u2019re all pulling from the same \u201csource of truth.\u201d<\/p>\n

This also dovetails with the launch of a new Data Governance initiative<\/strong> on campus (#whereismydata), which was proposed by our CIO after her visit to Arizona State. The goal is to better formalize where data lives\u2014not just in IR, but across the institution\u2014and ensure we\u2019re managing it strategically, governing it properly, documenting it seriously, and in the end, are all using it consistently and correctly.<\/p>\n

On a personal note, I was honored to receive one of the university\u2019s Distinguished Service Awards<\/strong> this spring, marking 28 years at Marshall, and to be invited back as a mentor in the John Marshall Leadership Fellows program<\/strong>, a program I proudly completed just last year as one of the fellows. It\u2019s been rewarding to give back and help cultivate the next generation of campus leaders, and I can assure you that my mentee is going to be an incredible leader!<\/p>\n

Hope to see you at the session next week. Let\u2019s keep telling better stories\u2014with better data.<\/p>\n

Brian M. Morgan
\nChief Data Officer, Marshall University<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Next Wednesday, our office will be hosting our second annual Data Literacy Session\u2014a chance to step back and reflect on how far we\u2019ve come in making data more accessible, usable, and impactful across campus. The session entitled \u201cFacts Decoded II: Exploring our University’s Data\u201d will build upon last year\u2019s session focused on unlocking the stories<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":78,"featured_media":1535,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[70],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-data2decisions"],"acf":[],"fimg_url":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/irp\/files\/Picture1-2.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/irp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/irp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/irp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/irp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/78"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/irp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1534"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/irp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1534\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1536,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/irp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1534\/revisions\/1536"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/irp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1535"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/irp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/irp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/irp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}