I closed my last blog entry with a table displaying a high-level matrix of KPIs, measures and dimensions for higher education institutions. A digital dashboard can portray the same tabular-format data in a more presentable way by displaying enrollment trends in colorful and meaningful graphs, alerts and notifications. Based on the analytical data presented, you will be able to understand your institution’s progress toward student enrollment goals. If your enrollment count does not meet the targeted goal for a particular term or academic year, the dashboard will trigger an alert indicating your current trend. This detailed and real-time analytical data will enable you to make more informed decisions for improving your enrollment trend in future terms.

Now let us look at a real-life scenario demonstrating this process. Let us say that in looking at your enrollment trend data displayed in the dashboard, you find that the Total Students count for African-American students has decreased for three consecutive terms. This is clearly an indication that you need to take certain actions to increase the African-American student enrollment in future terms. Having identified a problem, you can now take the precise action to fix it. In this case, your action might be to increase Financial Aid to African-American students in need, thus attracting more African-American candidates. This is what we call making an informed decision and taking effective action!

These are some key pointers that you need to take into consideration when defining KPIs, measures and dimensions:

1. Ensure that your KPIs are directly tied to your vision and mission statements
2. Ensure that you have set target goals
3. Ensure that the identified KPIs and measures are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound
4. Ensure that you have clearly defined each KPI and the benefits each can bring in managing institutional or campus performance
5. Ensure that the outlined KPIs, measures and dimensions are correctly mapped to business requirements

Over the last four blog entries, we have covered a strategic plan for defining KPIs, measures and dimensions for institutions of higher education. We have explored how to outline the KPIs tied to the institution’s vision and mission statements, how to measure the indicators and, finally, how to view the data elements related to measures. I hope the last few blog entries have provided you with the knowledge to begin designing your performance digital dashboard by identifying KPIs, measures and dimensions. If you would like me to provide more details on this subject, just let me know!

In my last blog entry, I laid out the basics for understanding the terms KPI, measure and dimension in the context of Business Intelligence for higher education institutions. In this entry, I’ll cover the means for defining Key Performance Indicators and measures that will drive your institution toward its strategic goals.

Let’s assume that your institution’s officers clearly understand all of the relevant external and internal environmental factors that impact the strategic goals, vision and mission directly. How must you then proceed to identify the indicators for measuring your institution’s position relative to its stated goals and objectives? What decisions must be made? What actions must be taken?

At this point, you may be overwhelmed with many unanswered questions. However, finding the right answers to these questions will guide you in defining the relevant KPIs, measures and dimensions accurately.

The very first step in identifying KPIs, measures and dimensions is meeting with the business users to understand their requirements for measuring institutional or campus performance. I’d suggest beginning with one functional area and then moving on to another. For example, Student Enrollment and Retention are two equally important indicators in the Student Administration functional area that all institutions want to measure. You can begin your requirements gathering in this area first. The business requirements will help you to identify the exact data elements needed for tracking performance in the Student Administration area. So in this case, your first KPI can be defined as Student Enrollment, and your second as Student Retention. Very good! You have successfully defined your first two KPIs!

Now, how will you track your student enrollment and retention? By head count? By percentage? By FTE? I apologize for throwing more questions your way, but, again, answering these questions will give you a clear picture of how to measure the critical indicators you defined earlier. Many colleges prefer to gauge enrollment trends based on these measures given below:

• Total Students – a head count of all students enrolled at the college.
• Developmental Students – a head count of developmental students only. Developmental students are those who have enrolled in developmental academic programs based on the Program Classification System (PCS) Code as defined by Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS).
• Full Time Equivalent (FTE) – computed based on students’ course credits.
• Student Status – examples would be new students (new to college without prior enrollment in any other colleges) and returning students (students who had dropped out earlier but have returned to the same campus).

These are just some sample measures that could help you to plan your work in identifying the measures related to the indicators defined earlier. Again, remember that these measures help you to track your progress and performance trends toward the predefined goals and objectives in your vision statement, while also meeting the business users’ requirements.

In my next blog entry, I’ll discuss how to define dimensions.