I’ve wondered for a while whether it would be worth constructing a dimensional model and associated metadata and reporting capability to assist with IT (or indeed any) project tracking.  I think I’d come to the conclusion that it would be very difficult to capture the current state of all projects in a consistent and accurate way at a frequency that improves on the traditional monthly ’stock take’.  That, after all is the problem with traditional project tracking - it tends to be performed periodically - typically in the form of a weekly, fortnightly or monthly status report.  The Project Manager scurries around getting people to tell them how much work has been done or is remaining against each of the tasks and then rolls it all up to some percentage complete figure.  This process is repeated across many projects every time the status report deadline is looming.

A problem with this is that the status report deadlines aren’t necessarily synchronised so the organisation never has a point in time picture of the status of all of its projects.  The only way around this problem I know of is to synchronise the dates in which case there is an end of month (or worse) frenzy for a day or two when no one actually does much productive work while the updates are captured.

An alternative might be for the updates to be provided constantly, trickle-fed into some storage medium (like a warehouse perhaps) on a daily basis, ready for reporting on demand at any time. No end of month frenzy and continual currency of all project data.

I realise that the above might not apply to all organisations, perhaps a monthly reporting frequency is fine and perhaps there are other reasons for needing to use this approach.  I also realise that consulting organisations are serving both internal and client reporting needs which aren’t necessarily aligned - perhaps all the more reason for a more flexible dimensional approach?

If we decided to try and implement such a system, the critical component would be the trickle-feeding of the daily updates into the warehouse.  Using Scrum as our development approach really helps in getting status updates on a current sprint and many of the modern tools, including the one we use, store the tasks and updates in a relational database that could be interrogated by a nightly ETL process.  The project backlog would have to exist and be estimated for the entire known project but of course as that flexed, so too would the multi-project reporting.

Aside from being able to report using BI tools, another nice thing about having project reporting in the warehouse would be around conformed dimension reporting where we exploit pre-existing warehouse content.  This enables reports such as Staff Project FTE : Staff Total FTE by Department Ratio which could illustrate commitment or investment in projects or programs of work at any point in the organisational structure.

Worth some more thinking?  We’ll see how readily we can get access to the project updates and the frequency of these in our brave new world of program and project management, but if this data is available then I think it could be a relatively simple schema to build and quite a powerful one to use.

The scary thing is it isn’t a million miles away from what you get if you do a Google image search for ‘Executive Dashboard’.  I’m starting to suspect that not a lot of thought has gone into the design of those devices either.

So let’s think a little more about the purpose of the executive dashboard in a modern university:

• inform the university executive about institutional performance
• communicate instantly, clearly and unambiguously
• automatically highlight matters that require attention (not just extremes)

Such a device might do this through:

• comparing actual performance against targets and/or prior periods
• careful selection and limited use of colours and saturations
• intuitive and informative arrangement of elements
• deliberate removal of unnecessary ‘clutter’ such as axis values when providing macro context
• use of simple elements - tables, bar, column, line, sparkline and bullet charts
• dynamic highlighting of data determined to be of high importance
• aesthetically clean and appealing presentation of information

If you review your favourite local BI report, the one you’re really proud of, does it achieve any of the above?  I did and it didn’t, but the change needed is underway.  When you do make change in light of improved understanding, the improvement really is quite obvious and something that can be learned.

I’ve actually been reading and learning (a lot) about visualisation for a little while now and I know there is a wealth of information out there to help us avoid building fuzzy felt disasters, but they just keep on coming.

I personally cringe when I see a lot of presentations, television commercials (oh don’t even go there) and magazine ads.  Does that make me a visualisation snob?  I guess it could but it also makes me want to evangelise even more.  I firmly believe part of our role as BI/DW professionals is to do a great job of communicating information.  The better and more developed our appreciation of good design, the better our communication, and as everyone keeps telling me these days, you can’t communicate too much.

If you’re curious about your ability to judge between good and bad graph design then have a go at Stephen Few’s Graph Design IQ Test and if you think you need some help then his book Information Dashboard Design should probably be on your desk (a lot of this also applies to BI report design too by the way).

I first used the above slide back in 2007 at the Cognos Asia-Pacific Forum to remind people that dashboards are the veneer of a BI/DW platform.  You simply cannot sustain an integrated dashboard without the underlying atomic data and that data takes a long time to get.  The quote I read at the time still stands:

“…the worst case theme is often called a scorecard or executive dashboard. This deceptively simple application draws on data from almost all business processes in the organisation. You can’t create the entire dashboard until you’ve built the whole warehouse foundation. Or worse you end up building the dashboard by hand every day, manually extracting, copying, and pasting data from all those sources to make it work. It can be difficult to get business folks to understand the magnitude of the effort involved in creating this ’simple’ report.” Ralph Kimball

So now that we have the data, you might think it relatively easy to create that dashboard, the one that people have been clamoring for since we started this wonderful process…

There are, it seems, an endless stream of people proclaiming what wonderful dashboards they have in their organisations but yet when you look a little more closely they often appear to be a disjointed jumble of content thrown together like one of those fuzzy felt pictures you used to play with at pre-school - lots of bright distracting pictures pointing all over the place, sort of related and sort of telling you an overall story, but then again not really.  They catch the attention for a few seconds and then, purpose served, their time is done.

It seems odd that this situation prevails, I wonder why that might be.  It certainly isn’t helped by the major vendors in the BI space who seem to believe that their purpose is to appeal to the fuzzy felt designers.

Working in BI/DW in higher education clearly means we all like a challenge and this is up there with the best I’ve had cause to think about recently.  How to effectively map the major processes of a university on a single screen, in an enduring manner, and in a way that simply and rapidly communicates an overall situation.  I’ll keep you posted…

I think it is a great reminder to those of us working in BI/DW that sometimes we can overwhelm our audiences with information and that there is a trick to finding the right balance.

The temptation is to give lots and lots and lots of information and let the audience worry about interpreting and acting on it.  I think I’m guilty of that at times.  We’re working on our Exec Dashboard delivery right now and guidance from visualisation experts like Stephen Few points to the same thing - keeping it simple can actually be quite difficult but makes the consumption so much easier.

At the moment the listserv mailing list is running in parallel but as I understand it, the plan is to review the list and perhaps create additional or replacement lists for direct correspondence in the future.

One of the immediate benefits of registering for the new site is that you can see the product and version number of the BI platform used at each of the registered institutions along with details of the ERP system where one exists.  As of right now there are already 28 registered institutions and 122 registered users.

I’m interested in claims reported on the BBC website that Gloucester College is seeing “significant improvement” in retention through the use of facebook.  As you may know, UNE has been an active advocate of Facebook for some time, a fact I proudly reported earlier this year and strategies such as these are very useful for UNE where such a high number of our students are based off-campus.  But I’m not sure how any of these various strategies can be directly associated with a change in retention.

While we all wish that the features of Facebook would just naturally appear in a Virtual Learning Environment or an online portal of some kind that students interact with, the painful truth is that they don’t, and even if they did students wouldn’t use them.  They like Facebook and they’re on that platform anyway so it would appear that Gloucester College and City of Sunderland College are finding ways to go with the tide rather than against it.

The problem of seeing who is using these systems, for how long, when and for what is something I feel is necessary before we can start claiming that they are having a direct affect on issues such as retention.  Maybe these UK colleges have found a way to tap into useage stats or perhaps they’ve built their own applications that include transaction logging which they can track back to some kind of student ID.  Maybe I’ll see if I can find out…

The Times Higher Education – QS World University Rankings exist to give students, academics, funders, politicians and policymakers, a broad view of the top institutions in world higher education.

This graphic from Brent Eades illustrates the rather limited geographical spread of those top 100 universities rather nicely.  I can see another version of this, weighted by population coming soon…

Rankings are an emotive mechanism, as Times Higher Education Deputy Editor Phil Baty would no doubt be acutely aware.  I’ve come to realise this also just of late with some quite strong reaction to simple measurements that we are producing with our BI/DW platform.

You can find out more and download all the University Rankings for the last 6 years here.

You only have to review the comments on Baty’s Talking Points post to see that everyone has a view on this.  There is also a very interesting article from Jamil Salmi and Roberta Malee Bassett called Measures Matter that eloquently raises some great points and in summary, notes

As acceptance - begrudging or otherwise - of rankings has settled into the tertiary education environment, the debate has moved on to how to improve their methodology to provide more useful and legitimate data on which to base well-informed decisions.

That pretty much sums up my stance on the use of measurement in Higher Education.  We’re still finding our way and discovering how best to combine the discipline of statistics with the powerful number crunching and visualisation capabilities of BI/DW platforms to serve both business and academic imperatives.  Yes, we have a long way to go and we can refine and improve what we do, but right now we operate in an era where we can enjoy timely access to information previously only dreamed of.  Surely we all have a responsibility to embrace that opportunity and collectively pursue the information-led transformation of our organisations.

Do you use measurement in your organisation?  Does your organisation appear in the one of the world rankings?  What is the general perception of these rankings and is there a correlation between ranking and perception?

Thought so.  You need The Pomodoro Technique.

Like all good things, this one is founded on a really simple concept.  Just focus on something, above all other activity, for just 25 minutes.  Then have a 5 minute break.  That’s a pomodoro.  Then repeat x 4, then have a longer break.

Try it. It’s surprisingly difficult for a lot of people, it seems that we tend to operate in an environment with a lot of interruption and distraction.  Francesco Cirillo worked this all out at university in the 1980’s and came up with a method of improving concentration and motivation which seems to have gained a huge following just recently.  I’m interested because it sits well with Agile and Scrum and BI/DW development (time-boxing and and the productive work/play dynamic).  If you read all the documentation you’ll be doing better than me but Cirillo would appear to have seriously researched this stuff.

The ‘internal interruptions’ are the thing that I probably suffer from most - it is actually quite comical when you think about it.  Why all of a sudden, at a particular moment you just have to look something up on the Internet, or make a phone call, or send a text message?

The solution to this procrastination issue, and one of the main benefits of Scrum are the same.  Make the issue transparent.  Just as you would identify and mark an impediment or a newly-emerged requirement as a backlog item in Scrum, so you highlight the existence of the interruption or the pressing need using the Pomodoro Technique.  I think the underlying message is the same - we operate in a dynamic environment so lets recognise and accept that but not let that unduly influence our progress or our short-term plans and goals.  Just as a Scrum sprint is short, so is a Pomodoro.  Lots of short iterations = higher chance of successful delivery which in turn increases satisfaction, motivation and belief.

We do actually have one of those pomodoro kitchen timers in the office now.  Its pretty noisy but probably preferable to an electronic screen-based timer in terms of impact and gained respect.  If you just can’t stand the idea, or can’t find anywhere to buy one (try eBay) then you can download all kinds of timers online, some specifically aimed at this technique, but give it a go, you might be surprised what you discover.

The image below is a summary of searches for UWS, Deakin and QUT since 2004.  The interesting bit is perhaps the rise in searches for UWS in that timeframe.

You can look at the results by region.  For Australia unfortunately that only seems to be state but still it confirms what one would expect - that Deakin has most searches originating in Victoria, UWS in New South Wales and QUT in Queensland:

Fans of maps can see an interesting visualisation ‘movie’ that replays the number of searches for one of the search terms over the period of the analysis.  In this case here is the latest map for Deakin searches:

You can also see a further breakdown of any of the given search terms.  In this case here are the ones for UWS.

And finally, a list of search terms that are increasing in popularity for a given period.  In this case, the last 12 months for UNSW.  Breakout indicates over 5000% increase in search volume for the period.

It is interesting but I’m not quite sure how this information can be used in our higher education context.  Maybe that is why Google label the facility as a way to ’see what the world is searching for’.

Check what the world has been searching for in the last month and you’ll find Patrick Swayze, The US Open and the German elections featuring pretty highly.  Hmm…

Michael Gibson provides us with his own interesting twist on Customer Analytics in another of our Guest Posts from Australian Universities (you can read all previous guest posts here)

Michael is Data Warehouse Manager at Deakin University in Victoria, Australia.

Last week I attended a 2 day Customer Analytics seminar up the road in Melbourne where one of our academics was presenting.  The free tickets were offered to me because my responsibility in BI seemed to be a close match (and because I suspect they needed to fill a few vacant seats).  While we don’t do anything directly in this space at Deakin, I still wanted to attend because I have used BI to do some of this stuff in the past, I have a background in marketing, and I’m always looking to learn new things and expand my horizons.

While some of the presentations were only partly relevant or simplistic, there were a couple that caused me to think about how the concepts could be applied in Higher Education – and I have to say that some of the ideas match quite closely to some important issues previously identified by Universities.

Customer Analytics (sometimes called Customer Insights) is a relatively new discipline that seeks to understand customer behaviour by analysing primary and secondary sources of data in order to predict future behaviour (an established practice we might know as Predictive Analytics).

People automatically assume this is used by the private sector to work out how to extract more money from our pockets, but this is only partially true.  Organisations also use this technology to improve social outcomes and drive greater operational efficiencies.  Some examples were given by a few government departments (inlc. the ATO).

You’d be surprised at how many (usually large) organisations are doing this currently.  The Insurance industry is going crazy over this stuff at the moment, partially to understand how high they can set your premiums before you decide to leave them (which they like to call pricing optimisation).

What does this mean for Higher Ed?  Well, by creating a ‘Student Insights’ function and better understanding students, universities can realistically achieve some of the goals they always seem to be banging on about, including;

• Lowering attrition rates
• Increasing academic performance of students
• Better targeted courses and units
• Better employment outcomes
• Delivering better services to students
• Process improvement / operational efficiencies
• Converting enquiries into enrolments
• Attracting desirable students through more effective marketing

Some Unis already dedicate some time to better understanding students to achieve the above, but I doubt it is done using these sorts of sophisticated techniques (I’d be happy to hear of, or from anyone who does).

The statistics presented on the benefits obtained by using such techniques is very compelling, just as BI itself usually mounts a strong business case, so too does customer analytics – but only if the organisation truly sees the potential value and can drive the initiative well. An organisation really needs to be customer centric to make this work.

There is obviously a large degree of commonality with the aims of BI, and a strong BI capability is necessary to do this well.

I imagine there’d be several areas within Universities interested in this type of capability (and not just the marketing folks), but I suspect it will be some time before we see anyone doing this well.

Several institutions in the US have used this type of capability to great effect, improving the quality and quantity of their applications, increasing student grades and lowering attrition – and increasing donations form alumni of course.

Michael Gibson
Data Warehouse Manager
Deakin University