Guide S35 -- Management Guide to Custodianship

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S35 Table of Contents

Corporate Data Categories

• Corporate vs. Non-Corporate Data
• Corporate Data
• Non-Corporate Data

Note: This section currently contains only the initial breakdown of Corporate Data. Until this section is updated to include full details that have been developed since Guide S35 was originally written, use the following documents for more detailed explanations in addition to what is here:

• Data Maturity: Introduction to Corporate Data Categories
• Corporate Data Categories
• Presentation notes on the Corporate Data Categories

Corporate vs. Non-Corporate Data

The quality of any data that is essential to the ministry's operation must not be eroded; it must be continually improved. To ensure this, the ministry expends significant resources ensuring its data remains accurate. To assist custodians in making a decision about which types of data really are essential to the ministry, the terms Corporate and Non-Corporate are used.

Full Corporate Data

In general, corporate data is defined to be data that is

• of a permanent or lasting nature;
• critical to the operation of the ministry;

Because of its importance, full corporate data is

• managed rigorously:
1. a Custodian is identified who is responsible for ensuring it meets ministry needs;
2. standards for definition, collection, accuracy, entry, use, update, disposal are developed so the information is used consistently across the ministry;
3. a primary physical source is identified so all staff know how to get the latest information.
• relied on to be accurate, meaningful, and available.

This stringent management of data has a significant cost. This cost must be weighed against the value of the data in terms of making business decisions. When the decision is made by the custodian that the cost is too much relative to the data's value, one can infer that the data is not critical to the operation of the ministry.

Full Corporate data can be further designated into two distinct sets: Shared and Program-Specific.

Shared - Full Corporate

Corporate data is generally, though not always, shared across one or more programs or between several offices. The distinction shared means the information must be treated with the highest standards of care and cooperation between ministry programs. Shared data generally affects several different program areas, and any change to such data invariably affects multiple computer applications, policies/procedures, and/or ministry business itself.

Program-Specific - Full Corporate

There is also vital data that requires careful management, but is not shared at all with other program areas, or is only minimally shared (e.g. Lightning Location). This data must still be designated corporate since it is so vital to the ministry, however, since the effect on other areas as the result of a decision about changing the data is slight, it may not need to be managed with quite so much rigor. All users of the data are within the program's accountability line, so the custodian will be cognizant of all relevant factors and be better able to consciously manage the risk involved. In a management sense, the custodian is the user for program-specific corporate data.

Extended Corporate and Local Corporate Data

Extended Corporate data is data whose structures (i.e. how the data is stored) have been published across the ministry (contact Data Administration staff for more information), and when data is stored, it is stored on a ministry corporate platform (e.g. an office LAN where there is professional management -- NOT on a personal computer).

Local Corporate data is that data defined and collected within an office, and not usually shared.

For more information on the above two categories, see the Corporate Data Categories document.

Non-Corporate Data ("Personal" Data)

Because the cost of managing corporate data is so high, a definition is needed for data that is still useful, but not relied on nearly so much for making critical decisions or providing specific information. This data can be termed Non-Corporate data. Care must be taken in the use of such data: since there is little investment in ensuring non-corporate data is accurate (no standardization in collection procedures, etc.), it should not be relied on without extremely well-informed judgment.

Non-corporate data could be data that is personally created and does not need to be shared. This may include scraps of paper, temporary files, some word processing files or spreadsheets, output files, or input files that are not shared for business purposes. Non-corporate data might be created to help answer tactical questions that operational-level corporate data is not quite in the best format for.

Non-corporate data could also be a copy of corporate data, taken at some point in time and manipulated outside of the corporate infrastructure (i.e. without regard for the defined standards for use and update of corporate information). As soon as the copy of corporate data is taken, it becomes non-corporate data.

Proportionally few resources are expended on the gathering and maintenance of non-corporate data. This makes non-corporate data easier to obtain but more dangerous to use, because to use the data properly the user must know more about where that data has come from, how it was gathered, and what transformations it has gone through. If the use of non-corporate data might lead to erroneous or inaccurate assumptions, then it should not be used.

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Last modified November 19, 1997