Overall Accountabilities

Core data administration and records management role

• Information Resource Management leadership and strategy
• Data modelling standards and services
• Produce intelligent and useful data structure design solutions within systems development projects that enable ministry staff to make effective business decisions
• To identify opportunities for sharing and utilizing business data across program boundaries, thus extracting maximum benefit from the data resource
• Records management standards and services
• Operational and policy leadership to the ministry as Ministry Records Officer, setting standards, procedures, and ORCS classifications and managing the ministry's multi-media records and information management program.
• Development and delivery of detailed training for ministry records staff as needed, generally scheduled 2-3 times per year, delivered at locations throughout the province, and ensuring all ministry staff are aware of their role and responsibilities for managing the records they create or receive.
• Data issue resolution or facilitation (where resourcing permits)
• Custodian of the enterprise data models, data dictionaries (metadata repository), and records classification system
• See also DA Purpose and Principles

Shared Work Unit Objectives

• Provide expert data modelling and validation services to all ministry information systems projects (spatial and textual), to build and publicise a comprehensive repository of resource management information.
• Promote sharing corporate data, managing information as a resource, and continue efforts to prepare ministry culture for the information management impacts of the continuous changes to forestry business (data integration from a business perspective is a foundation of an effective organization).
• Provide corporate data dictionaries (IDD, EDD) to the ministry.
• Facilitate resolution of business issues (resources permitting), or escalate critical, stalled issues through the Data Issue Bulletin process, which places a vital data issue directly in front of senior management (i.e., Data Custodians).
• Validate and authorize accessions (offsite storage).

Future considerations

The following are areas that we see as being vital to move the ministry forward in information management thinking, given adequate resources.

• Data utilization (i.e. leading business people into better utilizing the data we already do have) -- the focus for this one is more on the corporate culture change, rather than the "advance sharing by data models", which is part of the core DA role. Enhance the ministry's understanding of the concept of data quality, and increase management's ability to understand and utilze the ministry's rich data resources.
• Strategy for increasing data quality (tied to the "data utilization" point)
• Clarifying the ministry's business needs by adding the perspective of time, or history, to the ministry's data, rather than just storing everything (this will assist in later analysing business trends, assuming we store the right data)
• (future) Integrating records management (e.g. office documents) into the world of dynamically managed information (i.e. databases)
• (future -- if we get more staff, and that ain't likely!!) Business process design / process modelling standards -- currently this is excluded from the data administration mandate