Why You Shouldn’t Start with Data in Higher Ed
By Jennie Wong, Ph.D.
If you’re a leader in higher education and have been challenged to make real progress towards leveraging the data that is all around you, know that you are not alone. In the December 2022 issue of Science, authors from the University of California, Los Angeles, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology published a study describing universities as lagging behind business and commercial industries in “deriving strategic value from their data resources.”
As a consultant at Slalom, I’ve run across similar challenges in industries ranging from media, entertainment and beyond, but the issues are especially pronounced in higher education. Frequently listed issues from our customers include aging data infrastructure, siloed data ownership, problems with data quality and governance, and a chaotic ecosystem of analytic tools.
So how can education leaders chart a path through the morass with a limited budget and without getting overwhelmed? The answer may surprise you… Don’t start with your data. Start with your decisions instead.
(But haven’t you been told that data is the answer? Well, yes. But to quote The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you’ve never actually known what the question is.”)
Let us suppose that you are the CIO for a School of Business at a major university. Your data landscape is fragmented between your school and central IT and other centralized functions. Even within your school, data is likely fragmented between programs and systems. Where should you begin?
Start by considering the highest-value decisions that your organization needs to make in the next 6–12 months. There may be three to five that come to mind immediately. Which of these fall within the decision rights of your school, versus other levels of authority such as the university or larger system or district? How can you engage with your stakeholders to prioritize the one to two decisions that would most benefit from data insights?
Once a clear decision focus has emerged, consider the specific data insights that are needed. For example, perhaps the highest-value decision for your school is whether to invest in expanding career services. A relevant data insight might be, “What is the quantified value of our current career services?”
After you have this type of crystalized insight question, you’ll be able to separate the signal from the noise and identify the data sources that are “must” vs. “should” vs. “nice to have” for this analysis.
This type of decision-first approach won’t solve for everything, but it can get foundational data projects unstuck by connecting academic and administrative stakeholders to a compelling outcome and the benefit of being able to ground their choices in more than just instinct and anecdote.
Here’s a look at the overall approach.
Ultimately, applying this framework to data-driven decisions can empower higher education leaders to take a more evidence-based approach to their own operations, bringing analytic approaches out of the classroom and into the real world of running an institution of higher learning.
If you’d like to discuss these ideas and others, book a 30-minute meeting with me. https://calendly.com/jennie-wong
Jennie Wong, Ph.D. leads Slalom’s Education practice across P-12 and Higher Education. She is an award-winning researcher and received her doctorate in organizational communication from the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California. She has 20+ years of experience in organizations ranging from startups to the Fortune 500, including strategy, technology, evidence-based behavior change, and leading complex deliveries in Higher Education.
