Play 7: Promote

Play 7: Promote Data Awareness

Your department and its staff invested in data-sharing improvements by completing the previous Plays. It’s time to put your data into use internally within your department and externally with other organizations.

This Play provides ideas about how to communicate the available data for sharing so that your department yields benefits from data-sharing improvements. Promoting data awareness and consumption is important to justify future data-sharing investments and creates a sense of accomplishment for the team that helped the Plays.

Play 7.1: Internal Data Awareness

As previously noted, data-sharing improvements aren’t just for the benefit of data-requesting organizations. Your internal department teams benefit from the metadata you collected in Play 6: Describe Your Data. The Guidebook’s supplemental section, Benefits to Your Department from Executing the Plays, describes the benefits of executing the Plays. You can use this supplemental section to identify teams within your department and notify them of the enriched metadata and artifacts created in Play 6. Examples of stakeholders who may benefit from your team’s work include:

• Data Analytics

• Application and Data Management

• Information Security

• Departmental Programs

The first step is identifying internal stakeholders and teams benefitting from your data-sharing improvements. The Data Sharing Benefits page supplement helps you identify internal analytics, technical, and security teams that benefit from your enhanced metadata repository. The notes on the department’s datasets collected in Play 2: Identify Your Datasets may identify programs that frequently share data within your department.

Start your data awareness campaign by emailing relevant stakeholders to notify them of the improved datasets and their benefits. Be sure to use terms that are relatable to your target audience. For example, using the term “data descriptions” is more easily understood than “metadata.” You can also schedule a Lunch and Learn or online meeting to review the benefits and how to use your metadata repository. This creates an opportunity for rich discussion about the data, how it is used, and ideas for future improvements.

Track the benefits and their impacts as your improved dataset is consumed by internal stakeholders. You can supplement your BUCP tracking repository with internal benefits to help justify investment in future data-sharing efforts.

Be sure to notify interested internal stakeholders as you incrementally improve data-sharing for new datasets.

Play 7.2: Agency-Level Data Awareness

This Play provides ideas for promoting awareness of the enhanced dataset with other CalHHS departments. A great way to promote data awareness is through the CalHHS Data Subcommittee and Data Coordinators workgroup. Participants in these groups can help spread the word about data to interested stakeholders within their departments.

The CalHHS Open Data Portal’s Dataset Catalog is a tool to identify datasets. To contribute to the open data catalog and promote awareness of your datasets, create a de-identified dataset for publication in the CalHHS Dataset Catalog.

If you have datasets that other departments and organizations frequently request, publishing data-sharing information on your website is beneficial. The Department of Health Care Access and Information (HCAI) Request Data website is an example of a site that helps promote data awareness and data requestors’ understanding of data-sharing requirements.