Universities lag in capturing and using data to make institutional decisions

In a Policy Forum, Christine Borgman and Amy Brand argue that most universities lag behind industry, business, and government when it comes to leveraging data they generate for strategic decision-making and planning. Their view is informed by interviews with university leaders from 12 U.S. institutions. Interview questions addressed factors including participants' roles in considering how data is used in making key decisions, and the state of data infrastructure and management at their respective universities. Through their interviews, the authors note several common challenges universities face in capturing and exploiting institutional data. These include a lack of staff expertise in data management or governance and tension among stakeholders regarding data access, control, use and privacy. Investing in knowledge infrastructures, data management capacity, and transparent data sources could help address these challenges. “Even when their universities are ‘data rich,’ they also may be ‘data poor’ in that they are struggling to exploit data resources to their strategic advantage, or ‘data blind’ in being reluctant to initiate stakeholder discussions necessary to build consensus or governance,” write Borgman and Brand. “We encourage university leaders to embrace more objective and transparent data-informed models for decision-making.”