Starting a University Dashboard

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

When you start out making a dashboard, just try some metrics and see if they work for you. And if they don’t work, change them. Add to them. Figure it out. I wanted every unit reporting to me to have some measure in the dashboard.

We started really simple. We didn’t try to go through this whole big process. We just tried to do something. At first, we didn’t open it up for the whole world to see. In fact, I kept it a secret for six months. And then I showed my boss.

Some operational dashboards should not be made available to just any staffer. Because it’s the interpretation that’s key. I know support. My organization knows support. My boss knows support. But for instance, the research director doesn’t necessarily know support. They don’t necessarily know what’s going on. And the student newspaper surely won’t know how to interpret this stuff!

So what we didn’t want to do was open up this dashboard to anyone in the world to see it. It’s for use. It’s for our management decisions and for our ability to make those good decisions.

The other thing is I wanted it to answer common questions. I know what people ask me. Things that I had to go get the manager to dig up. I know most of the time what those things are going to be. So we built it for that so we could see what those common things would be.

I also wanted all the key information in one place. As I mentioned before, that the master report we have, it really does give me a different view because I am not just looking at one organization or one piece of data. I am looking at a bunch. And when you look at a bunch, you get a different kind of information. I wanted it to be current, and I wanted it at my fingertips any time.