When senior leaders at the University of Louisville (UofL) approached Vice Provost Bob Goldstein in early April 2016 with a request for a fully functioning data visualization platform by start of the 2016 fall semester—just four months away—he
Goldstein, along with Becky Patterson, Executive Director of Institutional Research and Planning, and her team, were able to create a primary data platform to support the university’s strategic planning process in just 60 days using SAS! The platform was expanded and released to deans, associate deans and other academic leaders within 90 days of the product acquisition, and in time for the start of the fall term.
The platform includes data on a wide range of strategic focus areas — academics, student persistence and success, diversity, philanthropy, Research spending, budgets, and more — to help UofL senior leaders make decisions in line with UofL’s 2020 strategic plan and measure progress toward those goals.
I was excited to chat with Goldstein and Patterson about how they made this happen with such an aggressive timeline.
When UofL began our journey, it was to create a data visualization platform that would facilitate the strategic and academic planning processes for senior leadership. The goal was to make the data readily accessible in order to drive the establishment and implementation of the university’s strategic agenda and priorities. Senior leadership wanted the data visualization platform to be available to the academic units so they can strategically prioritize projects and initiatives to support UofL’s 2020 strategic plan and the recently announced 21 Century University Initiative.
UofL needed the platform to be quite extensive and include the broad areas of focus outlined within the 21st Century University Initiative.
Absolutely. Using data to support strategic and academic planning has been, and continues to be, a priority for university senior leadership.
Primarily it is the senior academic leadership—deans and associate deans, as well as the senior staff within the Provost’s office. The long-term plan is to grant access to academic department and program chairpersons. Presently, UofL has a controlled deployment of the data visualizations. Since June 2016, 35 dynamic reports have been created and published. About 20 additional reports are currently in development. Our team continues to work with university leadership by seeking input about the data that will be most useful to their decision making processes.
It has allowed UofL to have the required data granularity. Reports can filter down to the academic program. The platform effectively visualizes the data with minimal training needed for report consumers. The data visualizations provide a systematic approach to presenting information about the university.
