Dashboards Deliver Data Visually at ASU

Arizona State University is now also a leader in dashboard use. This is a nice article from Campus Technology magazine by Linda L. Briggs:

ASU currently has some 30 dashboards across 25 subject areas, drawing on thousands of key data items. The popularity of various dashboards is cyclical, Rome said, but currently, a dashboard that summarizes CRM help desk support ranks high in use, as does a high-level financial report dashboard, along with dashboards summarizing HR reports and one on research grants and awards.

An enrollment management dashboard allows the user to drill down on courses and information on prospective students, then, with the right permission, to link to the Oracle PeopleSoft program to update student data. Another dashboard offers a visual monitor of class enrollment, so that when a class reaches a certain size, a red dot indicates that the class is near capacity. A quick visual scan can indicate the red dots that suggest where to consider adding supplementary classes.

Of special interest is the use of students in developing dashboards.

Graphic Intensive Slide Show to Illustrate Budget

An interesting new University of Michigan Web site uses graphics "to provide a concise online tutorial for people seeking information about the basic workings of the university’s budget, focusing in particular on the General Fund, which is the source of support for U-M’s educational enterprise.

The tutorial, University of Michigan Funding: A Snapshot, was created in response to questions from students and others about how the university is funded. It also has information about state support for higher education, financial aid, donor support and links to more in-depth resources."

'Flowing Data': Strength in Numbers

---

SCUP's newest book is A Guide to Planning for Change by Donald M. Norris and Nick L. Poulton. In it they address data analysis and reporting in support of decision making, and speak of what they call "analytics for the masses," meaning "A new generation of tools supporting analytics and alignment enables planners and strategists to rigorously measure, assess, and refine their strategies throughout cascading cycles of expeditionary execution. These analytics are not just for so-called 'power users,' but for all administrators, faculty, and staff." (p. 32)

---

Many kinds of SCUPers are interested in data: collecting it, analyzing it, displaying it, using it for decision making. Flowing Data is a website devoted to cool ways of reporting and using data - data visualization. Browsing in here you can get glimpses of what a future life with more and more information analytics will be like. Many people post here. The owner describes it to newbies this was:

The greatest value of a picture is when it forces us to notice what we never expected to see. If you're new here, welcome to FlowingData. A good place to start is the archives where you'll find FlowingData's most popular posts or take a look at the FlowingData beginner's guide. If you like what you see, subscribe to the feed. It'll only cost $1 million to do so. Yes, I'm totally serious. Really - which makes me a trillionaire.

Higher Ed Journalism: New Realities

This week's must-read is subtitled "How media coverage has evolved--and how campus administrators should respond" and written by Council of Independent Colleges President Richard Ekman. It very thoroughly covers the last decade of changes in how pertinent news - within and about higher education - gets generated and reported: "Growing public skepticism about higher education, reported widely in the media, has changed the journalistic styles of The Chronicle, Inside Higher Ed, University Business, USA Today, and other mainstream media. When legislators or federal officials know they can score easy points with constituents by issuing broadsides on matters of higher education policy, these politicians do half of the journalists' work for them. The education press has been criticized for not being very interested in publicizing serious and significant achievements of individual institutions, consortia, or whole sectors of higher education unless these achievements reverberate in larger policy circles."