PowerTalks: Best Practices in Collaboration

PowerTalks: Best Practices in Collaboration

Collaboration across institutional silos is becoming increasingly critical for the success of analytics initiatives. This section of the summit includes three short presentations about best practices with collaborative analytics efforts.

Presentation #1: Data Governance as a Foundation for Analytics

Understanding the basic tenets of data governance is key for anyone who works with data. IT leaders are often called on to use technology solutions for data governance problems: setting security controls for access to a database is a critical technology function, but who makes the decision about granting access? Reporting staff often struggle finding data, or finding the "right" data, to produce the relevant outputs. If there are no standard definitions for key concepts, how can there be a consistent analysis or report for those concepts? And for business areas, it is imperative that people understand what analytics can accomplish and how to draw the line between what is possible and what is permissible. No part of a university should figure this out alone. Data governance at the University of Rochester works with and across business lines to ensure that data are securely accessible, trusted, and understood in order to produce consistent, responsible, and meaningful analytics.

Presenter: Sandra Cannon, Associate Vice Provost for Data Governance and Chief Data Officer, University of Rochester

Presentation #2: An Integrated Approach to Analytics: An IR and IT Partnership

What organizational structures effectively support demands for data-driven decision-making? Learn how two offices—institutional research and information systems—combined their respective strengths in analysis and programming to turn a data and technology challenge into a successful partnership. To deal with high data demands, they created a data warehouse and data dashboards that automated the flow of data from extraction to dissemination and increased access to information for planning, assessment, and decision-making. The presenters will discuss the benefits of IR/IT partnerships, briefly describe the data warehouse and development cycle, demo Tableau dashboards, describe best practices in visualization, and explain uses of the dashboards.

Presenters: Joseph Contreras, Institutional Research Specialist in Data Analysis, Elisa Hertz, Director of the Center for College Effectiveness, and John Stroud, Chief Information Officer, CUNY Stella and Charles Guttman Community College

Presentation #3: What If We Acted As One?

As we look across higher education for the most successful results of business analytics, we continually find a high correlation between great outcomes and tightly integrated IT data warehouse/business intelligence and institutional research teams. The IT team brings strong knowledge of gathering and cleansing planning data. The IR team brings strong statistical data-analysis skills. Working together, these integrated teams seem to achieve results that aren't seen at schools without these integrated teams. We will look at a few schools where the outcomes justified the challenges of collaboration.

Presenter: Charlie Moran, Senior Partner and CEO, Moran Technology Consulting