Wednesday, April 26, 2006

1:15 pm - 2:15 pm

Level: Introductory

Since April 2002, the California Department of Education (CDE) has been implementing the recommendations of a study of the department's data management practices. The main effort has been on developing a Data Resource Guide (a catalog of CDE's existing data resource) and common data architecture. With over 2,000 employees, 138 data collections, over 20 divisions and a decentralized approach to data collections, this has been a challenging effort. This effort has brought national recognition of the California Department of Education as an activist in the area of data management. Topics will include:

• The Importance of Systems Thinking
• Critical Success Factors
• Indicators of Success
• Building a Winning Team
• Major Steps of Building Common Data Architecture
• Lessons Learned

Sonya Edwards has been involved with managing data since 1982. During the past three years, she has established and administered the Data Management Improvement Program at the CDE. She has done two monumental things: first, brought understanding to the existing disparate education data and second, brought the business people into the process. She started with a strategic plan and followed this plan, which is something that few people rarely do. She has started a common data architecture across education data and enterprise data architecture of the desired (to be) education data. She has built an excellent staff and her efforts have been recognized at the national level with recent appointments to the National Center for Education Statistics Forum, the U.S. Department of Education's General Statistics Task Force, and the Education Information Management Advisory Council.