UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI
“ Data is our most valuable strategic asset”
Bharath Prabhakara VP and Chief Digital Officer University of Cincinnati
“ We also have the first ever studentrun Security Operations Centre in higher education that supports our efforts in this area,” Bharath says.
Data as the university’ s crystal ball For a complex organisation like UC, all major decisions are driven by data – and that data must be clean and reliable to ensure decisions are correct.
“ Like you see in other large organisations, we have very siloed data,” says Bharath.“ We have data for all different kinds of things – ERP systems, HR and finance, student information and research data – and the challenge was that they were all in these little islands or swamps, as I like to call them, and the quality of the data was questionable because again, depends on the source where you got it.
“ It meant that, if you asked the same question to different sources, you’ d get different answers. So, we decided two years ago to build our enterprise data strategy and kick off a programme called BearCat’ s Insights.”
The initiative aims to bring all the university’ s enterprise data together with established data governance, towards the end goal of becoming a data-driven institution.
The new data lakehouse was only recently completed, having been built on AWS and leveraging industry-leading tools by Snowflake and Informatica.
“ We started with our student data but we are soon going to be moving in our finance and HR data once those data sets are clean, because we don’ t want any swampy data,” Bharath adds.
14 uc. edu