Campus Intelligence Workshops

Before anything else, you must fix the foundation. This workshop is focused on exactly that.

It’s a walk through the process of identifying all needed data resources, establishing a strong process to continually consolidate data into one source (de-duplicate, clean, normalize, validate), establish and drive collaboration among data team members (owners/managers, contributors, monitors, users), and document the important ongoing maintenance process to ensure continually high, reliable data quality.

It’s easy to create dashboards these days. It’s hard, though, to create the right dashboards that drive good decisions and collaboration.

This workshop is a step-by-step process of breaking down, analyzing and—when necessary—rebuilding all current dashboards, analytics, reports, KPIs—addressing common problem questions along the way. Are you measuring the right items? Do you have too many or too few KPIs? Is your analysis correct? Do you have errors, hidden data, data omissions, too high or too low granularity behind your graphs? Are the resulting trends capable of supporting the right conclusions/decisions? Are the graphs understandable to users?

This workshop is one of the most crucial of all. It is focused on the collaboration, follow-up decisions and response plans taken by you and your team.

When data and dashboards are in place to detect pending issues, problems and opportunities, how well-armed are you with a coordinated response? Can you transfer the data all the way through to its source where you can take preventative action to avoid impact from the problems? Do you have a feedback loop in place to send outcomes back to the data and dashboards, closing the link between cause and effect? Do you have the proper buy-in to achieve these goals? What is your process to maintain this workflow?

Upon completing the main workshops, we strongly suggest regular maintenance briefings which help address any new reports, procedures, goals, requirements that get added to the demands of your business intelligence approach.

It’s critical to ensure that these necessary additions are solved in a manner consistent with the overall best practice BI strategy. This avoids gradually reverting to inefficient or underperforming compromised processes and/or technologies.

Does everyone have the same vision of what you need out of your data and analytic systems? How about resources and roles and schedules? Most importantly, what about the desired impact and how you intend to measure success? An intense and open discussion about true needs, priorities, and realistic steps forward will get your team pulling together.

Even if you have a team formed, have a clear and shared view of what we’ll do first and how that fits the big picture is the single most important factor in a successful data strategy.

Student Learning is what assessment is truly about, often difficult to define but of increasing importance to try. There are an assortment of measures and data gathering approaches, and best practices on how to use them to measure your goals.

This workshop explores your goals and available data and helps produce reliable measures with current resources and a path forward.

Often the “need to see some dashboards” forces colleges to embark on software reviews and purchase projects well before they are ready to truly describe their requirements. But there are good prototyping tools we can use – some you already have – to take a sample data set and create a few prototype analytic dashboards to share with your team.

The goal is to get them involved in the process and decisions on tools, this workshop allows you to do that quickly and risk-free. In most cases the prototypes turn out to be very useful on their own in the short term.

Confusion that comes from multiple data definitions and sources frustrates many schools. Defining terms is a key element of collaboration and central data best practice, as is keeping it up to date.

This workshop leads to a single document that all users can refer to, and a change process that forces both flexibility and rigor.

Data is an asset to any college, it’s important to invest in its health so that when you need it it’s there and trusted. The effort by the ability to just have access to trusted data is enormous. Better yet – the value of forward looking analytics totally depends on the sustained quality of captured actual data.

Review and define all aspects of data management including ownership, access permission, integration, change management, quality assurance. Getting data to be trusted–and keeping it there.

How many things do you measure each week? Month? Year? How many are truly performance indicators that reflect how you’re doing against your goals? Of those which are truly key? Best practice studies have shown that reducing the indicators followed closely to the few key ones that measure success closely is the right way.

This workshop will explore the top 20 in your shop – and help you get them down to 5-6. The discussion about what’s truly important and the attempt to link measures to goals is on its own a great outcome of these sessions.

Retention and graduation rates are the most common indicators used in college analysis and compliance reporting. This of course should be easily automated and this workshop will review that goal.

But knowing why these rates rise or fall, and being able to see that enough in advance as to take preventive action is the Holy Grail of BI in a college environment. This workshop exposes these potentials and sets a path to get there.

Are you using information from student performance in your recruiting efforts? How about your development work? Seamless connection of data through the lifecycle can greatly enhance the analysis happening in all areas of the college.

This workshop explores the value of seeing your college, from a data point of view, through the continuous lifecycle approach your students use. This “enterprise” approach in general reaps benefits as you start to see connections between data sets that may be viewed separately now. We will also work on priorities and high value next steps to help you on the road to this vision.

Why have your students chosen to attend your university? Approaches to analyzing factors that lead to success or act as barriers to success, and strategies to use this information in recruiting or proactive interventions of all types. Using your own data and measures of success you can start to systematically reach out to your target community for applications.

By knowing a lot about how past classes performed given their incoming information, you can better prepare for ensuring the new cohort’s success. We work on ways to connect the dots.

Technology decisions that have long term impact should always be taken in concert with, and at the service of, your overall institution’s strategic plan. Bringing the vision of business analytic needs to the forefront of all technology investments may not be something you’re college is used to doing.

This workshop shows you how to get the synergy from your tech teams and your strategic business leaders into a working plan, that people on the non-tech side can understand and help manage.