CCC Master Data Management
MDM Vision
The Master Data Management (MDM) team is creating a robust, configurable data management system for the California Community Colleges (CCC). This data management system includes a user-facing MDM tool that gives colleges the ability to secure and control data flow both into and out of their college "zone." A "zone" in MDM, is a grouping of resources for a given entity. For example, a college district may have a "parent zone" for accessing data across its district colleges. Each college within that district would have its own "child zone," providing access to data for only that college, and the Chancellor's office would have a system-wide "zone" that spans all 114 community colleges in the state.
MDM works with the California Community College Technology Center's (CCCTC) CCC SuperGlue to provide a centralized data sharing framework that results in a holistic view of student success across all the separate applications that track student progress. MDM addresses the issue of "What is the record of truth?" for a resource in any given context. That source of truth is called a "master data record" and the resource might be a term, a student, a college, or a course. MDM provides multiple points for updating these resources and ensures that the master record is always updated, but allows each college to determine where those updates are applied. For example, a student address in an OpenCCC Account is updated by the student. MDM receives this change and updates the address master record. The college zone rules will then determine if this updated address is applied to the SIS, Canvas, or any other application that stores the student address within the zone.
Why MDM?
Data can be a powerful tool in providing guidance, feedback, and key predictive information. When every system within the educational enterprise is in sync, data-based actions and alerts can greatly assist a student's success. The key challenge is how to keep all the data in all these separate systems in sync?
With master data management all systems point to a single entity in order to subscribe to data updates. There is no need to build separate syncs between all the individual sources of data.
MDM Background
The CCC MDM project was created to support the Online Educational Initiative's Course Exchange project. The MDM framework can be integrated into all the system-wide data exchanges across the California Community College system.
When first approaching the challenge of synchronizing data across the CCC systems, the CCCTC consulted the IT consulting firm Gartner in the hopes of identifying an existing vendor with the MDM tools to address our system requirements. In the resulting Gartner report, they stated that no such vendor existed. This lead to the CCCTC's partnership with YouNite, who contracted to build an MDM system to the CCCTC's specifications.
Online-Education-Initiative-Grant-Proposal.pdf
YOUnite_Technology_Presentation.pdf
MDM Documents
Gartner Magic Quadrant for MDM