The twenty-second of November should be marked in your calendar.
That’s the deadline for the official, twice-delayed sign-off date for the Jisc/HESA Data Futures return – the date by which all validation checks must be passed and all the subsequent data queries addressed and signed-off.
The funders and regulators who depend on this data continue to offer pragmatic flexibility around the deadlines, recognising the problems that have been encountered in the delivery of Data Futures by many, if not all, stakeholders.
These delays also knock on to the tightly-packed calendar of annual data returns and events; HESES, Finance Return, ILR, NSS, Graduate Outcomes, and so on.
At the eye of this storm is a thinly-spread cadre of higher education data professionals. These are the people tasked with making the data returns; the people who have to digest hundreds of pages of dense, technical coding manuals in order to prepare and quality assure their data submissions. This community has spent the last few months wrestling with a data collection system that has encountered a myriad of problems, most painfully the inability of the validation systems to correctly reject data which is bad and accept data which is good.
