Background

RHB was retained by a public, mid-sized, rural university to assess the institution’s Slate governance framework.

Challenge

The focus of this project was to understand the current structure and capacity while providing the institution a path forward that promotes user confidence and cohesion as they consider opportunities to expand their current use of Slate. RHB was tasked with developing comprehensive Slate governance policies and processes for enrollment teams, specifically around security administration, business unit activities and data integrity processes.

Solution

Our engagement with the institution began with a current state analysis encompassing multiple interviews with Slate users and key stakeholders on campus. Additionally, RHB performed a technical analysis of user and security settings in Slate to establish a baseline for the current security infrastructure. The institution’s database housed three major enrollment teams (undergraduate, international and graduate/online). An important component of our analysis was understanding how these teams interface with one another and how they connect to larger systems and data infrastructure across campus. In our conversations with these teams, we assessed the extent to which the system is used (more importantly, how it is used differently). We also discovered a general lack of context among their individual teams about how to leverage the system, which created points of failure if specific alterations were made. Additionally, these findings brought to light a general concern regarding the integrity of the system due to inconsistent data management processes. During our technical analysis, we noted the design of multiple roles. However, permissions within the roles were granted liberally. We noted conflicts in the assignment of permissions versus population permissions in which users were inadvertently granted access to all records within the system instead of specific populations. A complete analysis of the number of permissions granted to individual users displayed substantial power to many users who could inadvertently impact the design of other teams.

Results

RHB provided our analysis back to the institution, including:

• Recommendations about how to structure a governance framework (which included a Slate Steering Team and representation on the institution’s Data Council)
• Considerations surrounding manipulation and future development of permissions, populations, roles and realms
• Training and communication plans
• A more robust audit of current processes under the new structure