Data Sourcing, Storage, and Stewardship

This unit teaches students how to locate, evaluate, and acquire the internal and external data assets small businesses need, including open data portals, social/professional platforms, sensor/IoT feeds, and existing company records. Students will learn ownership, privacy, security, storage, and management strategies and perform cost/skill trade-off analyses to prepare data for downstream analysis and predictive work in subsequent units.

Learning Objectives

• Analyze multiple internal and external data sources (e.g., open data portals, HealthData.gov, Data.gov.uk, LinkedIn, IoT/sensor and Wi‑Fi signals, and existing business records) to determine relevance, data type, quality, and fit for a defined small-business analytical question
• Evaluate legal, ownership, privacy, and security requirements for at least two real-world data sources and recommend compliant access and stewardship actions
• Apply data storage and management design principles by creating a basic plan that specifies storage options, metadata, retention, and small-vs-big-data strategies for a project-sized dataset
• Demonstrate a sourcing strategy and cost-benefit analysis that compares in-house versus outsourced skills, tools, and estimated effort to acquire, clean, and maintain data to support a predictive or insight-driven project