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 the different university systems that store data about a person and help these systems work together to identify individuals.

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

If you are using a CU VPN, you may also visit the CU People Resource page to learn how to request CU People data, current match rules and additional details.

Diagram of CU People and how to interacts with other data storage areas

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's record
    • Applying attribute survivorship rules (where applicable), meaning the rules that define what the 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 the best personal 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 by having more accurate, complete and consistent information about them available across campus systems
    • Improve the 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)