October 29th, 2009 by Rob Hale
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I’m quite excited because we are currently reviewing some designs for an executive dashboard. Now that we finally have lots of beautiful dimensionally modelled data in our warehouse with periodic snapshots going back almost 3 years, we are actually at a point where we can present some of it together in a highly aggregated manner to hopefully inform, influence and improve strategic decision making at our institution.
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…
October 23rd, 2009 by Rob Hale
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I saw a link to this on Flowing Data just now. Jessica Hagy is the illustrator and author and she’s been doing similar wonderful work for over 3 years and won countless awards for it.
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.
October 21st, 2009 by Rob Hale
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Just a quick one in case you weren’t aware. The Higher Education Data Warehousing forum has now progressed from a humble listserv to a website at http://hedw.org. Membership is free and open to anyone with an email address with an edu extension - worldwide.
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.
October 18th, 2009 by Rob Hale
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Retention is a popular subject for those of us involved in BI and DW these days. There is barely a week that goes by without someone asking for some retention statistics or wanting to know what we can bring to the process.
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…
October 14th, 2009 by Rob Hale
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I must admit just over a year ago when I started this blog, I didn’t expect the experience would be quite so rewarding and enjoyable and I certainly didn’t expect to still be going over a year later. This is the 100th post since that date and I therefore thought it fitting to celebrate the maiden century with The Times Top 100 University Rankings.
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?
