Operational Dashboards for Universities

This is the continuation of a transcript of a presentation by Stu Worman from Indiana University at an IT conference for unversity IT professionals.

So what does this mean to our academic community? By gathering this data you can really see whether you need to change your priorities. We set our priorities once a year, and we will make those priorities. I review them every quarter, and every once in a while, we know have to change them. Having that data helps us know when we have to change them.

Here are some questions that can help you get started on your operational dashboard for your university. What metrics do you already collect? Where do they live? What are you already tracking? What is not worth tracking? What metrics are key performance indicators? What can you automate? And who will be using it?

Let me show you some more dashboards we have made for our support center. Here are the contacts to the support center. The trend here is about the same as last year. The levels are lower, but the pattern is consistently that way. So maybe our course management system settling down has been a good thing for us. We had to figure that out.

What I look at here is I have multiple campuses to look at, but what I am seeing is that so far this fiscal year we have had 70,000 contacts into the support center. At the same time last year, we would have had 83,000. And the last fiscal year total, we had 233,000 contacts to the support center. So it just tells me, we’re down a little but that’s a good thing.

Let’s pick a day. On September 25th, for some reason we had 915 contacts in one day. That seems like quite a bit. Let’s see what happened on that day. What do you know? This was difficulty accessing our course management system. That happened on that day. This is going to our notification service that shows what happened.

And you can see this is more data on it, what happened, who was updated, when it was updated. I do get questions about this. What happened on that day? We have set this up so that our mangers can go in, and on a certain day if it’s something that we think we need to remember, we can note it right on here. So that we can remember, oh, gosh, we need to remember that that really messed our statistics because something extraordinary happened.