Data-Driven Decisionmaking
From Business Intelligence
[edit] Award Contact
If you have questions or would like more information, please contact John Tropman (tropman@umich.edu).
[edit] Award Description
Candace Terhune is Director of Administration, Finance and Operations, School of Social Work (SSW). Her organization of data for the school provides staff a highly expanded capacity for strategic analysis, without which, they would operate on “lore” rather than fact. She also draws on this data herself to turn questions into fact-based options. Candace is responsible for an SSW database that contains virtually all school data: financial, student, faculty and staff demographics as well as text-based files (offer letter, Memorandum of Understandings, etc.). This information, and its construction, allows instant access to basic aggregate and analytic analysis (means, correlations, regressions, inter-year slopes, etc.). The speed and timeliness of this information has proven vital to the high-quality decisions made at the school.
Candace enables staff to work faster, less expensively, and produce decisions of higher quality. The following list provides examples of contributions Candace has made to Business Intelligence at SSW:
- All the student data is available easily, which lets administrators request information regarding enrollment trends, instate/outstate balances, “yield” rates from admissions offers, student grade-point trends, and so on and obtain instant results immediately. As questions come up about items related to SSW data, administrators can respond immediately.
- The annual review process at the school awards faculty points (from 0-26). The dean then assigns a dollar value for each point. The dean was able to explore differential dollars, involving lower amounts for the “easy to get points” (say 1-10) and larger dollars for the “hard to get points” (say 11-26) and combinations among those ranges. Administrators were quickly able to see the implications of a variety of approaches.
- The executive committee and search committee have quick access to faculty demographics, time in service, retirement eligibility, so that SSW can post appropriate position descriptions and make good hiring decisions.