Brad Wheeler: - A lot of decisions today are made by, obviously, provosts, deans, department chairs, etc., and they're looking at systems of record that we currently have: finance, student, HR, etc. And they're … it's like “I just don't see the reports and the information that I need.” And a company comes along and says, “Hey, I got a silver bullet. You just upload all your data to us and we'll launder it, we'll press it, we'll give you reports back. We'll show you how you compare to other universities.” So, what we've learned over some early years is a lot of times when we send the stuff out, well wait, there were a lot of steps. We had to extract it ourselves out of our systems. We had to clean it ourselves. We had to get it in certain formats ourselves. And then, we finally upload it and then there's some black box of something that happens and it comes back, and we go, “That's not very insightful. How is that predicted?” And you go, “Well, it's a secret model. We can't tell you.” So, there's a lot of steps, and that's what I was trying to do in the article – make visible every piece of work along the way and debunk some of the magic bullet or magic bundle of “Just give us your money and we’ll make this wonderful.”
The CIO Minute: Laundering Your Data [video]
min read
Brad Wheeler: - A lot of decisions today are made by, obviously, provosts, deans, department chairs, etc., and they're looking at systems of record that we currently have: finance, student, HR, etc. And they're … it's like “I just don't see the reports and the information that I need.” And a company comes along and says, “Hey, I got a silver bullet. You just upload all your data to us and we'll launder it, we'll press it, we'll give you reports back. We'll show you how you compare to other universities.” So, what we've learned over some early years is a lot of times when we send the stuff out, well wait, there were a lot of steps. We had to extract it ourselves out of our systems. We had to clean it ourselves. We had to get it in certain formats ourselves. And then, we finally upload it and then there's some black box of something that happens and it comes back, and we go, “That's not very insightful. How is that predicted?” And you go, “Well, it's a secret model. We can't tell you.” So, there's a lot of steps, and that's what I was trying to do in the article – make visible every piece of work along the way and debunk some of the magic bullet or magic bundle of “Just give us your money and we’ll make this wonderful.”