Using analytics tools to answer institutional mission- and goal-aligned questions can help to facilitate the implementation of Dx initiatives.
In 2019, the EDUCAUSE Enterprise IT Program's focus is the relationship between enterprise IT and digital transformation (Dx). You can read about the Enterprise IT Program plan for the year in the blog post "2019 Exploring the Role of Enterprise IT in Digital Transformation."1 Resources related to our 2019 focus can be found on the Enterprise IT Program web page.
Our fifth, and last, set of resources for 2019 looks at the importance of using institutional mission and goals as the starting point for developing strategic analytics questions. Through the use of analytics, institutions can make data-informed decisions in important, mission-focused areas such as student success. But knowing which questions to focus on can seem daunting. It could be tempting to start with the data itself when actually the best place to start is with institutional mission and goals. By starting there, the organization's analytics efforts are more likely to produce the kinds of insights needed for strategic decision-making.
Digital transformation entails technology, culture, and workforce shifts that affect the institution in many areas, including the ways in which strategic decisions are made. While analytics efforts impact all three shifts, such efforts are more directly tied to cultural and workforce shifts:
- Answering mission-aligned, strategic questions will impact institutional culture.
- Identifying required analytic and data competencies and aligning hiring processes and practices will impact workforce.
Analytics tools can be used to answer many different questions. By using analytics to address carefully considered questions, institutional leaders can better understand a situation, shine a light on a problem or challenge, and guide thinking. Developing strategic, mission-aligned questions allows institutions to more effectively use data and information to inform decision-making and achieve goals and objectives. And, as institutional leaders make a practice of requesting data and analytics to support decision-making, the use of analytics can become more deeply ingrained in the institution's culture.
Understanding how to develop strategic questions and intelligently use data to answer those questions requires a certain set of competencies. Identifying requisite skills (e.g., data literacy, curiosity, intellectual rigor, and collaboration) that are needed to develop such questions ensures that the workforce can support your efforts. Once the requisite skills have been identified, institutional leaders can assess whether staff members possess these skills. After identifying gaps, institutional leaders can facilitate additional staff training. Developing staff competencies in data literacy, curiosity, intellectual rigor, and collaboration will give staff members the knowledge they need to craft and use strategic questions to support institutional transformation.
The Enterprise IT Program has developed a fifth set of resources related to the intersection of Dx and enterprise IT. Case studies from Broward College, the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, and the University of South Florida describe how three institutions used analytics efforts to identify at-risk students and change institutional culture to boost persistence and completion rates.
You will find more resources related to institutional transformation in the Enterprise IT Program's Analytics Toolkit, including the following:
- A report from three higher education membership associations on a variety of challenges and opportunities related to institutions' readiness to expand their cross-functional use of data
- An article addressing institutional ethics and student privacy in data analytics policies and practices
- EDUCAUSE research reports and EDUCAUSE Review article from a leader within the EDUCAUSE community
Carefully and collaboratively developing and answering thoughtful questions that are aligned with institutional vision and mission involves participation from people throughout the institution. The Enterprise IT Program web pages also feature links to other professional associations, such as the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) and the Association for Institutional Research (AIR), to facilitate the development of mission-aligned analytics questions.
We hope you find these new resources and the Enterprise IT Program helpful. Send us your questions, ideas, and suggestions by email.
If you have a story to tell about your institution's work in the area of digital transformation, or if you have suggestions or questions about the Enterprise IT Program, please contact Andy Clark or Betsy Reinitz.
For more on enterprise IT issues and leadership perspectives in higher education, please visit the EDUCAUSE Review Enterprise Connections blog as well as the Enterprise IT Program page.
Note
- Betsy Reinitz, "2019 Exploring the Role of Enterprise IT in Digital Transformation," Enterprise Connections (blog), EDUCAUSE Review, January 30, 2019. ↩
Andy Clark is the Enterprise IT Program Manager at EDUCAUSE.
© 2019 Andy Clark. The text of this work is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 International License.