3 steps to mastering Data Strategy in Higher Education
In today's competitive higher education landscape, institutions must prioritise efficient operations, a secure and connected campus, and an enhanced student experience. A crucial component of this is understanding and leveraging your organisation's data which serves as a a foundation for success.
How can higher education institutions deliver high-performance data strategies? We've simplified it into three steps:
1. Define a data vision around your institution’s business goals
A data vision boils down to a view of how data is going to help achieve overarching business goals. The best place to start is by looking at the institution’s strategic business goals and the plans.
Where the plans to achieve business goals rely on data, a data use case can be formulated. Data use cases are powerful because they articulate why an investment in data is needed, exactly what it will deliver, and the resources and approach required to achieve it. For example, if a higher education institution aims to enhance student well-being, one data-dependent solution would be to implement an automated early warning system to flag vulnerable students based on analytics of a variety of live data feeds. By creating a data use case, we can express what is needed from data in a business-friendly format.
Assessing and prioritising a set of these data use cases allows one to assimilate a data vision, highlighting the significance and relative urgency of investing in data.
2. Translate data goals into data capabilities
A data vision guides an institution, but the next question is how to achieve those goals. The key to achieving these data goals is to develop the organisation’s data capabilities. However with so many aspects of data capability to consider, this can quickly become a bewildering and expensive exercise.
To make data capability development cost-effective and targeted, organisations must balance their aspirations for what they want their data to be capable of against the maturity of their data capabilities. Using a framework such as 4dDX, can accelerate the objective assessment of an institution’s current state of their data capabilities against a target state, helping senior management to understand the gaps most in need of addressing. From here a realistic roadmap can be built to plan how data capability development will unlock the prioritised use cases for the organisation.
3. The nurture and champion a data culture
To ensure the success of a data vision in higher education, leaders must cultivate a perspective where data serves as an asset to guide strategic planning, policy formulation, and operational decisions.
Engaging senior stakeholders is crucial in securing the resources needed to bridge the data capability gaps in the longer term. By aligning data efforts with strategic goals, leaders can focus their often-limited resources on longer-term initiatives that drive meaningful and sustainable outcomes. Data is a lifestyle, not a diet!
A systematic approach
Mastering data strategy in higher education requires a systematic approach that extracts the data vision from the institution’s business goals, translates data goals into data capabilities and brings it together for senior management to drive the institution to meet its goals.
By following these three steps, institutions can harness the power of data to drive positive outcomes for students and faculty.
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