Putting Dashboards to Work in Institutional Research
The measure of an institution can take many forms — fast facts, accreditations, multi-year strategic plans. But those measures can’t be used to manage a school on a daily basis, since they’re simply snapshots. The information they contain is practically out of date the day they’re published, and on top of that, the details behind the broader facts aren’t readily available for rapid decision-making.
As Monroe Community College is finding, taking the pulse of the institution requires proximity to the data. Monroe, which has about 19,000 students, is one of the largest schools in the State University of New York (SUNY) system. College leaders — led by President Anne Kress — sought a way to monitor key metrics to strengthen institutional effectiveness.
According to Angel Andreu, director of Institutional Research (IR) at Monroe, as part of the strategic planning process, Kress asked each of her vice presidents to designate the metrics they considered most important for the health of the campus in their areas of oversight. From the multiple key performance measures they recommended, she set four top-level metrics:
- Access, tied to enrollment, financial aid disbursement, and scholarships.
- Success, related to retention, licensure rates, job placement, and graduation rates.
- Quality, to measure outcomes from surveys, research, and other programs.
- Financial, to watch costs compared to other SUNY schools, among other measures.
The IR office was given the job of figuring out how to monitor the plan’s effectiveness both quantitatively and qualitatively. Traditionally, when the college’s executives were preparing for a board meeting or some other planning session, they’d present their expected questions to the IR office in advance. Then Andreu’s team would do the research and generate reports for distribution in PDF format. «It was a lot of work,» he says.
Andreu knew that the introduction of a dashboard system could relieve his office of some of the work by automating the process of drilling down into the data. The college had tried out a dashboard product put out by the same company whose application they were already using for information analytics, but the IR team found that tool «very cumbersome.» Recalls Andreu, «We were looking for something that we didn’t have to go through a big learning curve on. We had a deadline, and we had to find something that we could work on and get it done without interfering with everything else we had to do.»
With the clock ticking, IR joined with its colleagues in IT to consider potential products. At a technical conference one person was impressed by a demonstration of iDashboards, an application by a company of the same name. A short-list product «shootout» convinced the group that iDashboards would be straightforward to work with, easy to use, and, Andreu adds, «The results looked like what we were envisioning for a dashboard.»
The college licensed the software for use on its own servers (a software-as-a-service model is available too), and about a dozen people went through training in October 2010. By the third day of the course, says Andreu, «We were designing our own stuff.»
All along the way, Andreu continued to keep the president apprised of the work, «to see if we were going about it the right way.» He explains that he knew what the design would be, because the president had already told him what she wanted. «It just needed to be developed.»
Over the next seven weeks the users in IR and IT quickly developed about 30 dashboards with 120 to 150 charts. The top dashboard provided four gauges to give a quick assessment of the four main areas of concern. The user could click on each dashboard to expose specific data and continue clicking to examine the data with even more granularity. The dashboard work with iDashboards was done by December 3, when the president used it in her last board meeting of the fall term.
Now, says the director of IR, campus leaders don’t have to figure out what data they need ahead of time. «They can log into iDashboards and say, ‘OK, here’s what the trend is for enrollment.’ If they have a question — how is that different between males and females? — they can click on a button and, boom, see that difference.»
Now the college is planning its expansion of the tool at the department level, a job for the IT department. iDashboards, says Andreu, is helping Monroe CC to meet requirements on assessment. And, adds the IR director, it has provided the means «for upper management to measure what’s going on with the institution and share that with the board.»
To learn more visit: www.idashboards.com/edu
Blog de Octavio Islas 