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The metrics that matter for higher performance in higher ed

August 15, 2008

Chris Grange is Vice-Principal (Administration) at the University of Wollongong, Australia, where he oversees student administration, finance, personnel, buildings and grounds, and student accommodation. A long-time Cognos customer, he sat down with Senior Writer Kelsey Howarth at Cognos Forum in May to talk about the metrics that matter in higher education, what BICCs are really all about, and the University's exciting new forays into predictive analytics

"A diversity of metrics to work with"

KH: For a university what are the kind of metrics that are really critical to you?

CG: There's a diversity of metrics to work with. Group one is about the commencing students. What are their entry scores? How many applications are you getting? How many can you accept? Are you accepting the right ones?

You want to improve by lifting your entry scores because you want to become more competitive. But we also have students from a range of educational backgrounds. So you need to be able to analyze all of those, and be able to admit students from all those different categories.

Atrition and retention

The second part is keeping track of their progress. You need to track performance indicators on the marks that they're achieving. And you want to check that that's been applied consistently.

You want to make sure that as many as possible are making it to the end of the process as well. Attrition and retention become important performance indicators.

Research income

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You also want to be looking at how much research income you're generating, in total terms, but more importantly, per capita. How much research income is each faculty member generating? Is that improving over time? How much are they publishing? How many high-degree or doctoral students do they have? And are they completing satisfactorily on those students? So there's a range of indictors in the research area.

Environmental impact

Environmental is an emerging topic as well. We're aiming for 25 percent reduction in energy consumption over the next two years in preparation for a carbon trading regime which will come in Australia at the end of 2009.

KH: Okay. I need you to just clarify this. You're using Cognos to track your environmental activity?

CG: We're building a dashboard of the energy and the water consumption of every building and facility within the university campus. We'll be able to see week-by-week how we're performing in terms of energy. Given that we are aiming for a 25 percent reduction in energy consumption over a two year period, that reporting is vital.

Let's talk about outcomes

KH: I want to talk a little bit about outcomes. Can you speak to any of the time saved, money saved, better information? Any of that sort of ROI?

CG: If I can't go to a senior person in research and have them say, "this is helping me," then we're not doing our job well enough. So I need to be able to hear that as I move around all the senior managers in the organization. And I am increasingly hearing that.

Building the performance management culture

KH: It sounds like you have a real culture of performance managers. I wonder if you could share some tips on how to get that started. Is it an executive sponsor? How did you create that?

CG: I think we've got an emerging culture of performance management. It's not where I think it should be yet. But I don't think you'll ever get there completely.

The other thing that we want to work on is about tailoring information for specific kinds of decisions.

One of the areas that we're working on is student marks. There is a range of information that we can marshal to improve the consistency of the decisions made.

We can show the grade distributions that were applied in previous years, the average grade distributions for the university as a whole, the average grade distribution, say, for the first year subjects, the grade distributions for a particular department. We can marshal all that into a report to the examination committees.

The BICC: "We actually had a party..."

KH: Last year at Cognos Forum we chatted about your BI Competency Center (BICC). How is that going? Is it getting a lot bigger?

CG: We actually had a kind of celebration party about a month ago. And they're really getting a lot of positive feedback now. So I'm really pleased with the way that process has gone.

[But] there've been tensions along the way. At one stage some of the business analysts wanted to get more technical. And we had to have a little sit down and talk about it and say, this is not an IT project. It's a business project. And the measure of success is how much engagement the business has in the project.

Justifying the ends and the means

This is what performance management is about. We're trying to change the way the business makes decisions. The technology is a means to an end. But the justification for what we're doing lies in how the business responds; whether it leads to better decisions.

Onward to predictive analytics

KH: You've tackled a lot of problems with Cognos, or challenges for the university. But now you're moving into more predictive analytics. Is that correct?

CG: Yes. We're trying to build a predictive model to identify those students who are at risk of not progressing, of dropping out, those kinds of things. It's a really exciting sort of project from our point of view.

It's got a lot of question marks over it. But it's an area that would have had real value, not just to use as a university, but to our students as well.

KH: Any other future plans?

CG: The underlying database system isn't as good as it needs to be. So we've got a project running to improve the data structures there before we move on to that as analysis. And then there are plenty of other priorities underneath that.

KH: Anything else?

CG: Just the surprises in the data.