Director, Data and AI Governance

📋 Description

• • Architect and continuously evolve UMGC’s enterprise-wide data and AI governance vision, translating regulatory, ethical, and strategic imperatives into living policies that scale across a 100,000+ learner global online university.
• • Serve as Secretary of the Enterprise Data, Analytics, and AI Governance Committee—owning agendas, minutes, risk registers, and follow-up actions—ensuring every academic college, IT squad, and executive stakeholder has a voice and a clear path to compliance.
• • Design and enforce federated AI governance policies that guarantee transparency, fairness, and auditability for every model—from predictive retention algorithms to generative AI tutors—while aligning with NIST AI RMF, EU AI Act, FERPA, HIPAA, GDPR, CCPA, PIPL, PDPA, and SOX.
• • Lead the Master Data Management (MDM) program, defining canonical data domains (student, course, faculty, finance, content), hierarchy rules, and golden-record standards that empower deans, registrars, and data scientists to trust “one version of the truth.”
• • Build and mentor a cross-functional data stewardship community—business data owners, local stewards, and technical custodians—equipping them with playbooks, KPIs, and issue-resolution workflows that turn data quality into a shared cultural value rather than an IT afterthought.
• • Own the end-to-end lifecycle of data contracts: draft, negotiate, and manage provider agreements for external datasets (e.g., national student clearinghouse, labor-market feeds) and consumer agreements for internal AI/BI products, ensuring every clause maps to governance, privacy, and security controls.
• • Drive User Acceptance Testing (UAT) for every governance-related release—data contracts, MDM enhancements, Purview policies, Unity Catalog permissions—within a SAFe Agile framework, defining acceptance criteria that satisfy both federal auditors and faculty power users.
• • Configure and optimize governance tooling stack—Microsoft Purview for catalog and lineage, Profisee for MDM, Azure DevOps for workflow, Databricks Unity Catalog for lakehouse governance—turning each platform into a seamless extension of university policy.
• • Champion ethical AI practices by instituting model-risk assessments, bias-detection dashboards, and retraining cadences that safeguard learner equity and institutional reputation.
• • Establish KPI-driven governance metrics—data quality scores, policy compliance rates, AI risk heat maps—and present quarterly insights to the Board of Visitors, transforming governance from a compliance checkbox into a strategic growth lever.
• • Facilitate change-management workshops, lunch-and-learns, and certification paths that upskill faculty, advisors, and administrators on data literacy, privacy rights, and responsible AI use.
• • Partner with Legal, Procurement, Risk, and Academic Affairs to anticipate emerging regulations (state AI bills, federal Title IV guidance) and embed proactive controls into every data pipeline and algorithm.
• • Oversee incident-response protocols for data breaches, model drift, or policy violations, ensuring rapid containment, root-cause analysis, and transparent communication to stakeholders and regulators.
• • Foster a culture of continuous improvement by benchmarking UMGC’s governance maturity against peer R1 universities and Fortune 500 ed-tech leaders, then piloting next-gen practices such as differential privacy, synthetic data sandboxes, and AI model cards.
• • Represent UMGC at national higher-education and AI ethics forums, publishing white papers and presenting case studies that position the university as a thought leader in trustworthy data and AI for online learning.