Little Wins
by Christopher Gutteridge
We’ve had two small data related wins this week, which will sound a little odd.
I’ve been investigating the database of module pre-requisites. This is the list of modules you have to have completed before you do other modules. In the Physics department choices in early years can mean you can’t do a module you want a couple of years later, so we want to make it easier for the students to understand the implications of a choice.
There’s no reason not to try to solve the general case, so I was working with the database for all modules, not just Physics.
When studying the data I found one module in biology with a very confusing rule:
A and (B or C) or D.
Where each of the letters was really a module code. I spent ages trying to guess if it should be read as (A and (B or C)) or D but maybe it meant A and (B or C or D). It was pretty ambiguous, and I don’t have easy access to the documentation.
When I contacted the student support office for Biology I got an answer I didn’t expect… it was actually a typo, which they fixed.
This is a nice reminder that using data helps improve it.
Also this week, we discovered some prodedural confusion. Members of the university can add themselves to the phone directory, which stores your extension number and room & building of your office. The location data isn’t in the open data as our current approach is that would be a separate opt-in and we should get informed consent to make someone’s office location public. We use the location to generate a mailing list for each building, which is imperfect as people don’t always keep their info up to date, but it means when there’s lost keys or cake you can email a meaningful group of people. This information is also used by the ECS porters to find out which of the 6 ECS buildings a letter or package needs to go to.
A couple of ECS people who work in a research lab kept having their records disappear and nobody new why. Eventually the database sysprog figured it out; the people who look after the phonebook were deleting these records as they didn’t have a valid phone number. I should stress that the people deleting these records were not doing anything wrong, as we’ve not effectively communicated to them what we are using their information for.
I didn’t even know there were people who theoretically “owned” this data, as its updated by the people themselves. I’ve been using data from that database in intranet systems for about a decade!
Once again, this isn’t a problem, as it’s not a big change in procedure to ask them to keep records even if they have no phone number or an invalid phone number.
The next step is to find out who this team is, and go and show them how valuable this data is. Hopefully we can give some value back to them and enthuse them to tweak their procedures to enable us.
I suspect that we’ll encounter this pattern many more times in the future; a database which the owner sees as something used just for their immediate team’s benefit, but is actually the canonical and authoritative source of that data for the entire organisation.
There’s some really interesting cases where the data that exists isn’t ideal as it’s been set up for a single purpose. In our HR database your “manager” is the person who approves your leave. It makes total sense in hierarchical departments, but in the academic side of the university it would cause confusion if you assumed it meant line manager. I don’t know if somewhere there’s a second database. Maybe we should request a “manager, if different from leave approver” field, which would be the least work for HR to maintain and would make the data more useful in building intranet pages etc.