Campus Technology Insider Podcast November 2022
Listen: Balancing Data Insight with Data Governance, Privacy, and Transparency
00:08
Rhea Kelly: Hello, and welcome to the Campus Technology Insider podcast. I'm Rhea Kelly, editor in chief of Campus Technology, and your host.
Ravi Pendse is passionate about data privacy. As vice president for information technology and chief information officer at the University of Michigan, he has worked to ensure that privacy is a part of every technology decision on campus. At the same time, he is committed to fostering a robust data culture that democratizes the use of data to inform decision-making. At the center of that culture is transparency: making sure students, faculty, and staff know exactly what types of data are collected, and how that data is stored, accessed, managed, and shared. In this episode of the podcast, we talk about creating a data-aware, privacy-aware ecosystem, data governance challenges, making data visible to students, and more. Here's our chat.
Hi Ravi, welcome to the podcast.
01:11
Ravi Pendse: Thank you so much. It's a privilege and honor to be with you.
01:16
Kelly: So at the University of Michigan, you've created a guide to personal data for students called ViziBlue. I'm wondering how that came about.
01:27
Pendse: Um, first of all, very appreciative of your interest in the subject of privacy and specifically ViziBlue. But I, what I wanted to do is just take a step back and share with you that I joined University of Michigan in 2018. So I'm in my fifth year now. And when we joined, working with all the stakeholders across campus, our students, faculty, staff, we set out five high-level goals or priorities that we wanted to focus on. And they're all tied to this. That's why I'm sharing this. One of them was really enabling data-informed decision-making across campus. Our goal was to democratize the use of data. And anytime you're talking about data, you have to think about security and privacy. The other goal was elevating the customer experience. And we wanted to be very best for our customers; we wanted to meet where they were. And when you talk about elevating the customer experience, often it's informed by data, because customers tell us if we're doing well or not, and that data becomes important. Again, then privacy of that data becomes critical. We were also focused on, University of Michigan is one of the top research institutions in the world. We do about $1.6 billion of research every year. It's a number one public research university. And one of the key factors there is delivering intuitive research computing solution. And when our researchers work on major projects, including vaccine developments, sending mission to Mars, and all of these interesting things, guess what drives that: tremendous amount of data, and tremendous amount of data movement. So you're talking about data at rest, data moving, that's again tied to privacy and security of the data. We are also focused on building a transformational network, because we wanted to have high-speed networks so our researchers could move their data from point A to point B or share that data with researchers across the world. And last but not least, tying all this together is how do we secure our open society. And when we talk about security, there we are tying against security and privacy. So as we thought about all of these five top goals, and important thread throughout is the privacy, respect for privacy, privacy for data, transparency for data, governance around that data, how that data is stored, accessed, managed, and shared. And the concept behind ViziBlue actually started as an ITS internship project driven by students. Our students were interested in trying to design a site that would provide them feedback on what data we collect on students, we meaning the University of Michigan. And so we created ViziBlue, but the initiative came from students. So ViziBlue, frankly, helps students understand how the data is collected. You know, for example, when they apply for admission and financial aid, or when they interact with teaching and learning tools such as Canvas, or when they use their, what it's called is M card, that's the ID card they swipe to enter a building or library, and many more. And how is this data collected? How is this stored? How does this data support university operations and life on campus? How do we use this data to enhance the life of a student, whether it's in classroom or outside of classroom? So under ViziBlue we also in addition to all of this information, we also provide links and resources where students can actually see their data and update their data. You know, maybe when they apply, oftentimes, that data may be their home address. But when they move here, the address may be different. So once they see that mail may be going to their home address and they want to change it, they can update that data, or maybe their banking information had changed now, they can update that data, and on and on. So the goal is there to also educate them, provide them the information, and allow them to interact with that data so that they could change it if needed. And the work on ViziBlue actually began at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. And the first iteration of the tool actually was released in August of 2020 to all our students across campus.