Posts Tagged ‘KPI’
Measures of Success
For the past two weeks of school, we’ve been learning about how financial statements and accounting data provide profitability information to shareholders and organizations. Since I work in higher education, I’ve been thinking a lot about how these principles of analysis for decision making are applied to our primary line of business: education.
Analytics and business intelligence technologies have been popular topics in the higher ed community. Especially in the past two years, vendors like Oracle, iStrategy and Microsoft have been promoting technologies and tools to help organizations transform transactional data into actionable data.
More and more, educational institutions are being challenged to demonstrate effectiveness and measure performance. Unlike the private sector, there is no FASB or GAAP that provides universally accepted principles by which organizations can report on and assess their performance. Business intelligence technologies provide organizations with tools to transform data into information in order to perform analysis and inform decisions. But having the right technology is only part of the equation.
Financial reports can be a valuable tool to help organizational leadership make decisions about how to improve the business. But the tool is useless if it is not used by a culture that is willing to take actions based on the information provided by those reports. This lack of a “culture of analysis” has been a common theme at the iStrategy user conference that I attended today. My colleagues at the conference seem to agree that, as users of the best analytics suite on the market, our organizations are extremely well-positioned improve assessment and measure performance.
And we agree that positioning is only part of the formula — to be successful we need to create an organizational culture of assessment. We all struggle with the same questions: What do we measure? How do we define success as it relates to our educational mission? What kind of actions will we take based on improved access to information?
During his presentation today, Don Norris (nationally recognized thought leader and author of an excellent Educause paper on Action Analytics), spoke about the relationship between analytics and alignment. Since most organizations understand this relationship in terms of financial reporting I find it interesting that so many struggle to apply the same concepts to performance analtyics.
