Strengthening Analytics in Government Agencies: A Toolkit for Sustainable Data Use Documentation Checklist

One of the largest challenges agencies face in organizing and documenting information is thinking about everything that needs to be documented to ensure sustainable data use and the preservation of institutional memory. An organization might have great systems for documenting processes, projects, or data, for example, and still find itself lacking critical information in other areas. In fact, strong documentation in one area can even lead a team to become complacent and overlook other important areas.

This tool details questions that highlight the breadth of knowledge that may be important for a state agency analytics team to track. It was developed based on the research team’s experience working with state agencies to build analytic capacity and later revised based on feedback from the toolkit interviewees. Depending on the size of your team and the scope of its work, you may choose to prioritize the quality of your documentation in some subset of these areas: Documentation of Source Data Systems; Documentation of Commonly Used Data Extracts, Views, or Datasets; Documentation of Frequently Used Definitions; Contextual Information About Data Collection, Quality, and Policy; Documentation of Analytics Workflows, Decisions, and Products. This tool is intended to highlight those choices for your consideration.