Schedule

Institutions have a massive amount of data at our fingertips. There are powerful tools to help produce interactive, flashy dashboards and charts to help visualize that data. However, often these charts are quickly reviewed and misunderstood. How do you influence your organization to use these tools to help make informed, strategic decisions? How do you move them past the initial picture illustrated in the reports to reveal the underlying issues?

As SMU, we recently implemented a robust enterprise IWMS software. Facilities, IT and many other departments are using the same platform for customer requests and many other business processes. This has provided a wealth of data across the institution. We've developed dashboards to support customer service processes, management, course scheduling, risk management, event management and many other processes. Along the way, we've learned so much about how to build and present these datasets. We also came face to face with the lack of expertise or understanding of how to best use these datasets to drive change.

In this session, I'll share how we are equipping people to understand and use this data through a multi-level approach. We'll cover how we design and build the dashboards, how we introduce them to the organization, and how we are building the data literacy across campus to help employees use this information more effectively.

Takeaway

• Key considerations for building the dashboards and reports
• Helpful considerations for introducing the dashboards to your organization
• Bridging the gap of data literacy: strategies for helping close the knowledge and skill gap for understanding and analyzing data