For the past several months, SCUPer Donald M. Norris has been interviewing leaders in the field of analytics, with regard to higher education. He has summarized best practices and vision in the white paper this post is titled after is also subtitled: "Insights on the Leading Edge From Interviews With Vendors, Practitioners, and Thought Leaders." It can be downloaded at the Public Forum on Action Analytics. 

The following quotation is from page 7,  "Five Insights From the Vendors":

• First, greater affordability and substantial pressure for continuing cost reductions was a pervasive theme. Institutions are demanding this and the vendors are responding. Vendors expressed the desire to provide analytics solutions for any type of institution, and touted examples of community colleges, small professional schools, and mid-sized universities that had deployed affordable analytics applications. The financial crisis will accelerate the affordability imperative.

• Second, the need is widely recognized for analytics that are designed and delivered for the masses and are user friendly and widely available. While some power-user-based reports will continue to be “pushed” out to users, over time analytics increasingly will be “pulled” by ever more sophisticated end users using applications crafted for the masses.

• Third, multi-vendor analytics environments on many campuses will continue to be the norm. Many leading-edge institutions are hedging their bets against a single vendor solution. Indeed, no single vendor solution exists for the multitude of analytics needs and opportunities necessary to achieve the ultimate solution – Action Analytics.

• Fourth, the conversation about new analytics capabilities is closely linked to the emergence of the enterprise technology that will succeed LMS 1.0. On the exhibit floor and in the hallways at EDUCAUSE 2010, a favorite topic of conversation centered on “What is your next LMS decision going to be?” Institutional leaders are exploring many options, including no formal LMS at all. These conversations inevitably included enhancing the analytics that existing LMSs have been unable to provide or support adequately.

• Fifth, there is greater sophistication in talking about the future uses of affordable analytics among vendors and campus executives: presidents, provosts, CFOs, CIOs, and campus planners. Over the past several years, the ERP, LMS, and Analytics vendors have been educating the marketplace – and one another – on how to move beyond the limitations of the existing ERP and LMS stacks. What new analytics needs will be required to deal with emerging institutional needs. Likewise, campus leaders have been facing greater pressure to provide accountability statistics and to improve performance, which requires embedded, formative analytics.

Data visualization ought to be a shared area of interest among SCUPers in areas ranging from strategic and institutional direction planning, through academic and resource and budget planning, and also facilities planning and design. The video about data visualization we are sharing is titled Journalism in the Age of Data, which might appear to be divergent from the interests of the SCUP constituency, but it's an excellent primer on understanding the use of data visualization techniques to make sense of sometimes incomprehensible data.

Like it or not, this is something planners will have in their core toolbox in 10 years. And here's a link to a website where you can get some hands-on play with data visualization.

Ohio University wanted to get started with analytics (business intelligence) but didn't have much money. This Campus Technology magazine case study explains how they did it and what they learned:

Also working to give input and feedback to Wykoff's team was a committee of various users. That committee, which has met weekly for a year and continues to meet and give input, includes representatives from budgeting, finance, the registrar, the bursar, and other academic personnel. As the group gains an understanding of just what BI solutions can do, Wykoff said, excitement is building. "There's starting to be a little line [of people] saying, "How can we get on the BI list and be next?'"

One lesson Wykoff offered as the project moves into its second year is this: Delivering the right data to end users through BI is an iterative process. "Once [users] see the data, they're going to ask a different set of questions [than the first time around], or realize some assumptions," she noted. That makes BI different from a more traditional software development project, in which user needs are researched, then a system is installed, modified, and left to run.

Don't miss out on joining nearly 1,500 of your colleagues and peers at higher education's premier planning event of 2010, SCUP–45. The Society for College and University Planning's 45th annual, international conference and idea marketplace is July 10–14 in Minneapolis!

Here's your SCUP Link to "A Review of System-Wide Reporting at the University of Hawai'i" (PDF)

Hans Peter L'Orange, who is presenting on State Level Data to Inform Decision Makers at SCUP-45, is SHEEO Vice President for Research and Information Resources. This report is his analysis and suggestions, from earlier this year, for how the University of Hawai'i can "to rethink the operation...and plan for an integrated data systemthat is, integrating fiscal, human resource, and student data": Essentially, how it can restructure institutional research, system-wide.

The current situation finds the University at a decision point: will the Systemwide reporting function become increasingly distributed and fragmented or will a formal, centralized strategy be developed? Indications from UH executives imply a shared interest in a stronger, centralized reporting culture. If so, a collective and collaborative process is necessary to develop basic reporting principles where everyone knows who does what, how it is done, and when it is required. This is a leadership decision rather than a technical choice. It’s an opportunity to develop a comprehensive strategy for the future and move from a “data dump” (i.e. MAPS) culture into a decisionculture based on analysis. It is a process of moving from data management to knowledge management. This not to imply that data management is no longer important; if anything, it becomes even more critical as data resources are used to develop information and ultimately knowledge. Without structured processes for managing data, high quality, decisionsupport information cannot be provided to decisionmakers.

Don't miss out on joining nearly 1,500 of your colleagues and peers at higher education's premier planning event of 2010, SCUP–45. The Society for College and University Planning's 45th annual, international conference and idea marketplace is July 10–14 in Minneapolis!

Here's your SCUP Link to "2010 Institutional Research Conference Roundup"

Inside Higher Ed's Doug Lederman reports out from the early days of the 2010 annual meeting of the Association for Institutional Research (AIR). This report is about student retention and student retention rates. One interesting study from, Washtenaw Community College (MI), found that students transferring to 4-year schools did well, but that those who did best had been at the community college for shorter periods of time. We think Lederman's introduction nicely portrays institutional researchers:

Institutional researchers are higher education's version of a utility infielder. That doesn't mean they lack expertise: They specialize in bringing data to bear on issues and problems, and explaining and interpreting those data to campus constituents who often come at the information from widely varying viewpoints. Their versatility comes, though, in the wide range of subjects they touch and of decisions over which they have some influence.

Given that eclectic role, the annual forum of the Association for Institutional Research typically covers a plethora of topics, and this year's meeting, the organization's 50th, is no exception. But it is also true that examining the forum's agenda usually offers a sense of which issues are keeping institutional leaders up at night, since those are often the topics that presidents and provosts and other campus officials have asked their data gurus to dive into.