McMaster team recognized for building a better way to work with data

“At a university the size of McMaster, institutional data doesn’t live in one place. It’s scattered across many systems, and pulling it together for a report or planning exercise has historically meant a lot of manual work. A cross-campus team of employees is building a better approach. Their work recently earned them an Innovation Award at CANHEIT , Canada’s largest conference for higher education IT leaders, researchers and technology innovators. “This is really a recognition of the people behind the work,” says Andrea Oliver, director of enterprise applications and data services, who accepted the award on behalf of the team. “It reflects what’s possible when we bring together expertise from across McMaster and focus on solving real challenges.” The new data service is built on Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft’s unified data and analytics platform. It helps bring information from across the university together so teams can use tools like Power BI with more consistent, reliable data. That matters because many teams at an institution like McMaster need to work with data independently while still relying on shared standards for governance, privacy and security. Rather than each team sourcing and reconciling data independently, the service provides a common, trustworthy foundation. The result is less time spent on data wrangling and more confidence in the numbers when it matters most. It also gives McMaster a stronger foundation for future analytics needs. “This isn’t just a tool,” says Oliver. “It’s a new way of working with data across the university. We’re making it easier for people to access the information they need, when they need it, and to have more confidence in it.” Already making a difference The impact of the service has already been tangible. In Human Resources, it helped simplify a reporting process that had previously required significant manual effort. “There was a noticeable difference in efficiency,” says Katie Millar, manager of people analytics. “Once the data model was in place, it only took a couple of hours to build what we needed. It made it much easier to respond to questions as they came up.” This kind of outcome reflects the team’s broader approach. The service was designed with campus partners from the start, so it addresses real needs rather than theoretical ones. University Technology Services now manages the service as an institutional offering and is slowly beginning to expand it to new areas of campus. For the team behind the work, the award is meaningful recognition. But the larger story is the long-term value this work can bring to McMaster by making data easier to use in ways that support better planning, reporting and decision-making across the university. The post McMaster team recognized for building a better way to work with data appeared first on McMaster News .

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