my EMBA Chronicle

We recently talked in class about the qualities that make a great leader:  vision, determination, insight, creativity, etc.  Throughout this election week, I’ve been wondering what Barack Obama’s most significant leadership qualities are.  In previous elections, I cannot remember so many people around the world who were inspired and enthusiastic about our choice of a presidential candidate.  The fact that Obama’s campaign has not only ignited our country — but those around the world — is an indicator of great leadership.

One of the things that I admire about good leaders is their ability to invent.  And, as a technologist, I am even more impressed by leaders who recognize the power of technology and leverage it for their success.    Chris Dannen wrote an interesting article about how the Obama campaign not only recognized how technology could be an effective tool for the campaign, but made a commitment to exploit technology in a way that will likely reshape political campaigns going forward.

Obama the Technologist from www.tuzworld.com

This is an expansion on my thoughts from last week about Father Brown’s lecture and the “Is Google Making us Stupid” article.  Technology does promote a high speed, in/out model of gathering information.  Because I access information in a much more fragmented way I have become more fragmented in the way I think and learn.  As I started getting worried that too much skimming was dulling my brain, I had a few instances this week that made me wonder if learning that seems fragmented on the surface does in fact, lead to deep linking and deep learning.

I have always been a fan of lists and paper-based information archiving, i.e. writing everything down.  From my point of view, by writing it down I free up value disk space in my brain that can store bytes of new information.  Since I am such a fan of information archiving, I’m not so great at information recall — paper is my memory.  But this week, I had a few cases where I was randomly inspired to recall information.  In one instance I opened an old document that had ideas about a project I’m working on simply because I happened upon it while searching my archives.  In it, I discovered a to-do item that I nearly forgot to do.  This made me wonder about whether the connections we make to data are deep — regardless of our fragmented methods of access.

It seems that my I/O brain is retaining more information that I thought, I hope I don’t need to add more disk space.

www.flickr.com/photos/fornal/394740182/

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.