Data Visualizations: Will the big BI vendors catch up to the niche players?
June 5, 2008 | Leave a Comment
The New York Times has really been stepping up its infographic department in recent years. Take a look at this data visualization showing how different demographics voted in the recent democratic primary contest.
All politics aside, I’m most interested in the fact that although this was more than likely developed by an information or graphic designer, it looks like it could have been produced by a BI tool. Of course a tool is just a tool without the data organized in such a way that makes the tool useful (but that is a subject for another post).
What fascinates me is how far the major BI tool providers are from producing these types of visualizations. It seems to me that they are so focused on the integration issues with all of the consolidation in the industry that there isn’t enough time to add the features that decision makers want - new and exciting ways to communicate information that helps them take action.
If you’re interested in data visualization, I highlighted a few interesting developments in the field in my recent column in Campus Technology Magazine.
It seems to me that that the quality gap between the data visualizations produced by tools and those produced by designers is getting smaller, but it is the niche players in the business that are making this happen. I’d love to be proven wrong though.
Thoughts?
Webinar - 6 Best Practices for Successful Institutional Intelligence
June 3, 2008 | Leave a Comment
On June 18th, ASR will be hosting a Webinar titled “6 Best Practices for Successful Institutional Intelligence.” The Webinar is an extension of an article written by ASR’s Director of Higher Education Services, Graham Tracey, which was published earlier this year in Campus Technology Magazine.
Since institutional intelligence initiatives require ownership across the college or university community, registrants are encouraged to convene in groups including institutional researchers, IT professionals, and decision makers from the major operational divisions.
Click here to read the full presentation description and to register.
Back from the 2008 AIR Forum
June 2, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Is there a more committed group of higher education professionals than the members of the Association of Institutional Researchers (AIR)? Last week more than 1700 researchers, analysts, and planners gave up their Memorial Day weekend to descend upon Seattle and attend the annual AIR Forum. ASR Analytics was proud to be among them.
Like most of the attendees, my colleagues and I came back from the conference full of ideas and renewed excitement for the work that we do with and for our clients. Here are a few of the highlights from our perspective:
- During the Monday morning plenary, AIR executive director Randy Swing spoke about AIR members meeting new challenges in an increasingly transparent and more accountable environment. He called for members to look beyond the tools to provide institutional intelligence and renew focus on the methods to produce and disseminate information more widely across the institution - a point of view consistent with that of ASR’s methods for delivering institutional intelligence solutions to colleges and universities.
- While there were certainly many sessions providing practical every day advice, there were many more sessions than in past years emphasizing the increasing importance of the IR office in strategic planning.
- The poster sessions were really well done. Unlike at most conferences, there were dozens of poster sessions that were quite well attended. Attendees were clearly appreciative to learn new and innovative research methods that were on display at these sessions. Don’t skip these sessions next year if you’re interested in learning something new and networking with leaders in the field.
I want to thank the hundreds of people that took the time to come by the ASR booth and speak with my colleagues and me. I hope you learned a bit from our conversation as we most certainly did from you.
For those of you that entered our contest to win an iPod Nano, let your suspense go no further: Judith A. Jaffe from Brandeis University is the proud new owner of a black iPod Nano. Judith, if you’re reading, this sleek little number is on its way.
The art and science of ‘Elevatoring’
April 16, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Elevators go up and they go down. Not very interesting are they?
Actually, there are some changes afoot in the elevator industry that are quite fascinating such as the proliferation of gigantic skyscrapers being built across the globe. But, aside from this video of a man trapped in an elevator for 41 hours, what caught my eye in this article in The New Yorker was the discussion of analytics being applied by elevator consultants, a practice known as ‘Elevatoring.’
Elevatoring practitioners are employed by architects to determine the correct number, size, speed, and layout of elevators in a new building. Get it wrong and the building is doomed. Elevatorists (is that a word?) must apply predictive analytic techniques to get the design just right. How a building will be used is important, but so is cultural nuance. All kinds of variables must be considered. For example, people get very upset if they have to wait more than 20 seconds for an elevator in an office building, while they will tolerate 30 or 40 seconds in a hotel or apartment building.
Here are a few more interesting facts:
- Probable stop rule of thumb: 10 people in an elevator serving 10 floors will make 6.5 stops. 10 people in an elevator serving 30 floors; 9.5 stops.
- There should be enough elevators operating efficiently enough to move 13% of the occupants of a building within 5 minutes.
- Standard elevator measure is about 2 square feet per person.
- People in Asia will tolerate less personal space than people in the U.S. and willingly cram onto elevators at much greater density rates.
Anyway, if you can find a few minutes to read this quite lengthy article I guarantee you will never look at elevators in the same way again.
(Found via Kottke)
Write a book supported by econometric models in minutes
April 15, 2008 | Leave a Comment
This one goes in the category of ‘it has to be seen to be believed.’ Phillip M. Parker of Websters-Online-Dictionary.org has been experimenting with the use of computers to automate content development. This video shows how he has been able to produce books and reports fully backed by data and econometric models.
Imagine, being able to write your next report, business case, or economic study in less time than it takes for one to read it. Watch the video to see how it is done.
ASR Director Authors Featured Article in Campus Technology Magazine
March 28, 2008 | Leave a Comment
The March issue of Campus Technology magazine features a cover story written by ASR Analytics’ Director of Higher Education Services, Graham Tracey. The article, titled “Stir up Your BI Initiative,” details the ingredients needed to implement business intelligence successfully in higher education. His next article in the magazine is about data visualization and will be published in the May issue.
Population Trends Causing Universities to Scramble?
March 12, 2008 | Leave a Comment
In a recent article featured on the front page of the Washington Post, Valerie Strauss looks at how major demographic trends are impacting the higher education landscape. These demographic trends include a drop in the number of high school graduates (starting with next year’s graduating class) and significant changes in the racial and ethnic characteristics of the high school graduates. It is projected that over the next decade the number of white graduates will decline by more than 10%, while the number of minority graduates will experience significant double-digit growth. Minority student enrollment at colleges and universities is expected to grow during the next several years, with some analysts projecting that it will be as high as 37% by 2015 (it was 30% in 2004).
So what do all of these demographic trends mean for colleges and universities around the country? First, the student population at most schools is probably going to look quite different in a decade. Just ask Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, president emeritus and professor, from George Washington University who is quoted in the article as saying:
“The majority will become the minority, there will be more Hispanics, more African Americans, more Chinese, Indians, Pakistanis, Koreans. I anticipate that the most common last name in the freshman class will be Kim.”
These trends will also significantly impact the way colleges and universities recruit students, deliver financial aid, and market themselves to prospective students. A significant trend discussed in the article is for colleges and universities to focus recruiting efforts out of state, in areas where the pool of high school graduates is not shrinking like it is most areas of the country. For example, George Washington University has set up recruiting offices in cities around the country (e.g., Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago, Boston, and northern New Jersey) to expand domestic recruiting and at the same time is devoting more time and resources to overseas recruiting. American University is pursuing a strategy of increasing recruiting in population growth areas such as Arizona and other western states.
At the same time, institutions are thinking about ways to reduce the financial burden of pursuing higher education. Actions highlighted in the article include increasing financial aid budgets and expanding scholarships for students that remain in-state to attend their public, state university.
It would be a very interesting study to expand on the findings in this article by talking to more institutions and finding out how they plan to deal with these challenges. Specifically, I’d like to know the following:
- Are all schools feeling the effects of these trends?
- To what extent are schools with different characteristics feeling the effects (e.g., geographical location, size, public vs. private, etc)?
- What are some innovative ways schools are dealing with these recruiting challenges? What about financial aid?
If you know the answers to any of these questions, or know of any additional studies please let me know.
Measuring the ROI of Social Networking as a Recruitment Tool
March 7, 2008 | 2 Comments
In a recent interview appearing in Campus Techology magazine, we hear from Brad Ward, electronic communcation coordinator for Butler University. Mr. Ward is employing some innovative techniques to reach out to potential students, all based on the power of social networking. One of the sites used extensively at Butler is Zinch.
Zinch is a social networking site that is currently used by more than 300,000 students and 475 colleges and universities. The site allows students to create detailed profiles that go beyond the standard test scores and GPA that seem to dominate the college admissions process. By buidling a profile that contains information about their extracurricular activities, passions, talents, and skills, students can show themselves as a unique applicant and not just a set of standardized numbers. Zinch even has a feature called Z-Folio which allows students to upload their artwork, videos, writing, and athletic highlights.
Admissions officers at colleges use Zinch’s Advanced Zeeker search tool to filter and query all of the student profiles stored on the site. They can use this functionality to locate and target students with specific characteristics and interests. Student data can be downloaded and loaded into the college’s communications management system.
All of this allows students and colleges to better target each other and connect in the recruitment process. This is evident from the message displayed on Zinch’s homepage:
Dear student, showcase yourself to your dream college.
Dear admissions officer, showcase your college to your dream student.
At Butler, Mr. Ward is seeing intial success with Zinch and some other innovative social networking techniques (e.g., YouTube video blogs, Facebook fan pages). For example, the “open rate” (percentage of mail messages that are opened by a recipient) seems to be about 3 times higher (i.e., 33% vs. 11%) for messages sent to students on Zinch, than they are for typical e-mail blasts.
While these intial figures are encouraging, Mr. Ward speaks to the real challenge in these efforts in his response to the last interview question:
[Another problem is], in terms of YouTube and sites [like it], there’s not yet a defined metric of what is successful. If we put these videos up on YouTube, was that worth it? There’s nothing to measure this stuff with yet.
That makes it a little tougher when we try and pitch these new sites and new ways to recruit. Hopefully, in the near future, we’ll all start to be able to define what success is and whether it’s worth it to be on Facebook and those kinds of sites.
Mr. Ward has hit the bullseye with this comment. The key to this recruiting effort is figuring out how to define success, measure results, and acheive some measure of ROI. Admissions officers need to get creative. For example, by creating something like a “Student Engagement” metric, colleges could measure and track the responsiveness of students to different types of communication. For example, higher scores could be assigned to students who join social networking groups, post or respond on a blog, or participate in an admissions online chat. When combined with the data from your student information system a full engagement picture emerges. This data can then be used to help forecast and predict enrollment more accurately and helps you target the most engaged students to help ‘evangelize’ on your behalf.
Given the increasing use of social networking tools by high school and college students this is going to become an important part of the recruiting efforts of colleges. While building this strategy, admissions professionals should also think about measuring outcomes.
Accountability reporting turned upside down
February 21, 2008 | Leave a Comment
A few months ago I wrote about the proliferation of accountability reporting initiatives within higher education. In conversations we’ve had with institutional researchers, one thing is clear; accountability reporting takes up far too much of their time and provides very little strategic value. But it doesn’t have to be that way. So ASR set to turn the problem upside down and approach it from an entirely different perspective.
Today, ASR is pleased to announce a new solution for accountability reporting called the Accountability Framework for Higher Education.
Moving Beyond BI Shadow Systems
February 16, 2008 | Leave a Comment
A recent post on The Data Doghouse, a Business Intelligence blog, explains that data shadow systems are still extremely prevalent across industries and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. Data shadow systems are groups of spreadsheets and local, customized databases - often built in Microsoft Access or Excel - created by business groups to provide data for their users. An excerpt from the article shows just how prevalent these shadow systems are:
In a survey we conducted in the fall of 2007 we found that the medium number of data shadow systems at an enterprise was 30. According to the survey, data shadow systems are prevalent in all industries, companies of all sizes and throughout various business functions in the enterprise.
The presence of shadow systems is a trend we’ve seen with our own clients in education, government, banking, and insurance. For many of our clients, different shadow systems are providing business analysts with the data they need to answer important business questions, recognize trends, and make informed decisions. Obviously, these shadow systems are providing a valuable service. However, despite these benefits there is a downside to operating shadow systems. Let’s take a look at some of the negative aspects of shadow systems.
First, it is often time consuming to implement and maintain data shadow systems. Data shadow systems are typically cobbled together by business users. Let’s face it, designing these systems is not the strength of business users (this is something that is bettered handled by the IT department). This leads to a design framework that requires lots of labor-intensive maintenance activities and a lack of felxibility and extensibility.
Second and most importantly, these shadow systems do not enforce rigorous data management techniques and principles. For example, consistent business rules may not be used across the organization to clean and codify the same data. The result, data quality and consistency suffer and it is difficult to know how confident decision-makers can be in the numbers being reported.
So the question is, what can be done to move beyond the use of shadow systems in your organization. The best approach is to engage the IT department and use the organization’s existing Business Intelligence (BI) tools to tackle this problem. BI tools should be used to centralize data, implement consistent and documented business rules to clean data, and develop reports that meet the needs of business users and stakeholders.