CU-People is a suite of data management applications within a single system that stores basic information about the university’s constituents, however they interact with us. CU-People also keeps track of all of the different university systems that store data about a person and helps these systems work together to identify individuals.

Image 1: CU-People's primary source systems

CU-People enables sharing of data between multiple source systems (where appropriate) and can make decisions about the “best” value for certain data based on set rules (refer to Image 1: CU-People Systems Diagram). CU’s Data Management Groups help make the sounds business decisions that set the rules for data matching.

Objectives:

CU-People meets the following objectives for CU staff who work with data:

  • Identify duplicate person records across source systems in real time
  • Enable robust “fuzzy matching” of person records, meaning that the systems can identify Debora, Debbie and Deb as the same person and merge the record as a single source across all source systems
  • Generate the best person record possible through:
    • Creating a unique Constituent Identifier for each person record
    • Applying attribute survivorship rules (where applicable), meaning the rules that define what a best person record looks like
    • Providing a centralized service to clean up addresses against an up-to-date address database
  • Provide a universitywide master person record that is used by all appropriate source systems (see Image 1: CU-People Systems Diagram).
  • Synchronize of the best person record across all source systems, including name, correct address, phone, email, etc.

Benefits:

CU-People provides numerous benefits, including:

  • Strategic:
    • Provide better service to constituents through having more accurate, complete and consistent information about them available across campus systems
    • Improve success of communicating and interacting with constituents, throughout the admissions to alumni/fundraising lifecycle
    • Lower costs of managing multiple person repositories, reducing manual processing of duplicate records
  • Tactical:
    • Identify duplicates using fuzzy matching techniques
    • Provide a broader population of constituents available to search against
    • Reduce the number of duplicates added to any system
    • Offer an enriched and unified constituent profile data that related systems can rely on
    • Establish data management rules for person biographical/demographical data (globally and locally to each system)

Previous systems: Master Data Management (MDM)

Related systems: CU Student Integrated Systems (CU-SIS), Human Capital Management (HCM), Advance Alumni/Donor system, eCRM Salesforce system

Where to go for help: Contact the UIS Service Desk @ help@cu.edu or 303-860-help(4357)