Friday, May 23, 2008

Re: School databases and the staffing for management of those databases

I completely concur with Ken and the only caveat I would add is to
assign a person in each area to be responsible for the data. That way,
at least one person is trying to keep a handle on what goes in.

Matt Burkhardt, MSTM
President
Impari Systems, Inc.
=EF=BB=BF401 Rosemont Avenue
Frederick, MD 21701
mlb@imparisystems.com
www.imparisystems.com
(301) 644-3911


On Fri, 2008-05-23 at 10:36 -0400, Griffin, Ken wrote:
> We're currently starting down this path (as we plan to integrated our
> Blackbaud Raiser's Edge database with our Education & Financial Edge).
> We have a similar model to what has already been mentioned: an IT
> resource handling all the technical DBA work with power users in each of
> the groups that understand their front-end modules & processes.
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> If the data is not clean / normalized (and without good data entry rules
> / process guidelines or controls my guess is it won't be) the approach
> I'd recommend is forming a committee of key resources from each of the
> areas (Development, Admissions, Finance, Dean's Office, etc.) to both
> create the standards and to clean the data. A concentrated data
> clean-up is the only way I've successfully done it. Trying to do it
> over a period of time always seems to fall short. This concentrated
> process can be long & somewhat painful but gets you to the right
> starting point.
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> Once clean, I plan to have my IT DBA do quarterly checks for the things
> we can't control / restrict systemically and calling on this committee
> when issues or new items arise.
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> -Ken
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: A forum for independent school educators
> [mailto:ISED-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU] On Behalf Of Jennifer Davenport
> Sent: Thursday, May 22, 2008 1:15 PM
> To: ISED-L@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU
> Subject: Re: School databases and the staffing for managment of those
> databases
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> As a shoot-off from Fred, for those of you who don't have a dedicated
> Database Person (even though you probably need one), how do you deal
> with
> data cleaning? Is it a once-in-a-while thing you do? Or is it an
> ongoing
> collaboration between several departments? We can't seem to get our act
> together on this one.
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> Jen
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> On Thu, May 22, 2008 at 12:41 PM, Fred Bartels
> <fred_bartels@rcds.rye.ny.us>
> wrote:
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> > Renee, Alex, Curt, Kate, Dave and Tom,
> >
> > Thanks for your thoughtful responses. It is really quite amazing how
> > database driven our schools have become over the past twenty years. It
> is
> > also quite amazing (though of course typical) that every independent
> > school has a different approach to managing these databases. It seems
> > clear that a full-time database manager/coordinator/facilitator is
> > becoming a defacto position at many schools, and that making that
> position
> > explicit will become more common moving forward. In our case, a
> > long-serving administrator who developed and maintained many FileMaker
> > databases will be retiring in a year and we are starting the process
> of
> > researching how we will move forward without him.
> >
> > Should be interesting.
> >
> > Fred
> >
> >
> >
> >
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>=20
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