How do I off board members in ArcGIS Online? Tertiary Education Institution Focus.

As your education institution increasingly relies on ArcGIS Online for teaching and research mapping and geospatial needs, it's vital to establish a robust plan to ensure efficiency, continuity and easy offboarding processes for students and staff.

Establish a Data Governance Plan

This robust plan is often referred to as a data governance plan for your education institutions ArcGIS Online subscription.

What is Data Governance?

Data governance is about setting institution-wide standards – data policies – that apply to how data is gathered, stored, accessed, processed, and disposed of.

Why have a Data Governance Plan?

A data governance plan for managing an ArcGIS Online subscription can help you plan for increased use of your ArcGIS Online subscription and avoid problems.

What should be addressed in a data governance plan for an ArcGIS Online Subscription?

• Monitoring utilisation of ArcGIS Online
• Handling of user content when a student or staff member leaves your institution
• Regularly informing users of your data governance plan and how it will impact them

In developing a data governance plan for ArcGIS Online, a good starting point can be to review any existing data governance practices you might have for other systems, and mirror those. Answer questions such as “How often is data purged?”, “What happens to existing content when a user leaves?”, etc.

Consider including in your data governance plan a statement about when content will be deleted. For example, Content will be deleted when the owner has not logged in during the last 2-years and no one has viewed the content in the last 3-years. This statement will differ between education institutions. You might want to check with your educational institutions ethics people, before adding this statement, to see what the general policy is about keeping students work.

Monitoring utilisation of ArcGIS Online

The ArcGIS Online Usage Reports (Organization>Status) are a good place to start. They provide easy access to total usage data. Further analysis and efforts may be needed to provide information for ongoing, repeat usage, as well as daily reporting. Check out the GIS for Everyone (…and how to build your own ArcGIS Dashboard to show it!) blog for an example of how to implement further analysis of an ArcGIS Online subscription.

Offboarding users

Ensure that proper messaging is in place when off-boarding members of your ArcGIS Online subscription. Proactively remind members – before they leave – about their options for transferring content, and what happens to their content after they leave.

Some options that you might like to give your members who are leaving your subscription are:

• Transferring their content to another member of your ArcGIS Online subscription
• Transferring their content to an ArcGIS for Personal Use subscription
• Transferring their content to another ArcGIS Online organisation – only applies if the person leaving your education institutions is shifting to an organisation that has an existing ArcGIS Online subscription.
• Deleting their own content

We encourage you to empower your users to take care of the offboarding process as much as possible.

Some tools that are useful for offboarding members are listed below:

• ArcGIS Assistant developed by a team from Esri Professional Services, this tool is not supported by Esri or Eagle Technology. This tool can be utilised by any member of an ArcGIS Online subscription.
• Admin Tools for ArcGIS Online by GEO Jobe GIS Consulting. This tool can only be utilised by a user who has the role of Administrator in your ArcGIS Online subscription.

Communication

Members of your ArcGIS Online subscription will not implement their part of the data governance plan if they don’t know about it. Therefore, you will need to ensure that the members of your ArcGIS Online subscription are regularly reminded about the plan. So, use the different communication channels within your education institutions to widely distribute the plan amongst your users. Do not forget to include the data governance plan when onboarding new members to your ArcGIS Online subscription.

In conclusion, a robust data governance plan is essential for managing members and content in an ArcGIS Online subscription. It helps you monitor usage and handle offboarding smoothly.

If you need further assistance with a data governance plan for your ArcGIS Online subscription, please contact your Eagle Technology Account Manager.