Data Definition
Data strategy starts with a question: what information will your organization need to collect, store, access and analyze to make informed decisions? A data inventory first identifies the data categories, elements, definitions, and metadata needed to support the data strategy. This includes defining a data vocabulary, including the data sources, data owners, data stewards, and data applications that are associated with each data element or category.
Data Standards
Educational data standards such as CEDS, SIF, PESC, IMS Global, and Ed-Fi all address a single issue: how to simplify data exchange in the entire educational ecosystem, between applications, services, people (educators, parents, students), and organizations (vendors, and post-educational institutions such as hiring companies). The answer to which data standards you deploy where and between which applications is a key component of your data architecture development, and systems integration will become easier and less expensive when the right standards are used by all members of the ecosystem.