Digital Transformation Challenges for Universities: Ensuring Information Consistency Across Digital Services

Abstract

Universities struggle to offer complete, up-to-date and consistent information about their key assets to their numerous users across various digital services and communication channels. Key assets include people, papers, books, dissertations, patents, courses, and research projects. The main difficulty stands in the intrinsic data fragmentation and data diversity: data about the key assets is scattered across multiple information silos, data is often duplicated and difficult to correlate due to the diversity in the format, metadata, conventions, and terminology used. We illustrate how this difficulty can be tackled and describe the work carried out at the University of Trento in Italy.