Leeds’ ten-year strategy is a blueprint for a values-driven University – one that harnesses expertise in research and education to help shape a better future for humanity through collaboration.

Data is a vital underlying component of our overall strategic aims. Its collection, storage and use are essential to the University’s day-to-day operation, as well as research that enables new discoveries. 

In short, without proper storage and access to appropriate data, major programmes like Digital Transformation can’t happen. 

What does the Data Strategy mean for me?

It’s vital that our Data Strategy – which you can view and download from the attachments section on this page – sets out the vision and action plan to make overall better use of data. 

It provides an overarching plan to address the current cultural, behavioural and structural barriers to modernise storage and use of data at the University – and show how the new Data Service team will enhance the governance and management of data University-wide.  

The strategy also gives an outline of a vision that will, eventually, lead to the introduction of a centralised platform for storing data – one shared across various teams and services, allowing data to be extracted and used in different ways:

• making it quicker and easier to handle some administrative tasks, helping free you up for other work;
• we'll be able, as a community, to make better use of modern data disciplines such as analytics, AI and machine learning; and
• enabling researchers from all over the University to securely access relevant data, safe in the knowledge that it will be stored and tagged consistently. 

Next steps

Chief Data Officer Monica Jones will be presenting a case study as part of Times Higher Education’s Digital Universities UK event on Tuesday 18 April that shows how the University has used data for its digital transformation efforts.

We’ll also be providing plenty of other examples of how the strategy is impacting our use of data, as well as updates on the various projects around the strategy – such as centralising data processing – as things progress over the coming months.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact the Data Services team.