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CT Samples Educause Western Regional
4/29/2005
This past week's Educause Western Regional conference in San Francisco offered the broad range of topics you'd expect to find at the annual conference, but gave attendees the advantages of a smaller, more intimate event. We caught up with CT Advisory Board member Mary Jo Gorney-Moreno Thursday morning during a break, to get her reaction after chairing her discussion session, "Data Warehousing and Mining for Data-Driven Decision Making."
Gorney-Moreno, who is associate vice president for Academic Technology at San Jose State University (CA), shared the following insights with CT:
"One of the things that was really wonderful to learn is that we all have the same questions and issues, and nobody has really solved the problem: Neither those of us who are working between legacy systems and ERPs, nor those who are three years into an ERP implementation have found a way to use the data for decisions.
"So, many levels of problems came out in the session. One is, when you look at data from a traditional research perspective, you have to have a research question before you attempt to solve a problem-and you need to define that problem. What happens when you buy a large ERP is that you don't get to define what data you want; you get the data that's designed by the ERP system. Our particular [university] system has bought the plain vanilla version [for use at San Jose State University], without modifications of the giant ERP. So, we're now going backwards and trying to look at this as the data we have: How do we now design the questions with the data that we have, or look at modifications?
"Another of the problems that is ongoing is with shadow and legacy systems. Since people aren't able to get the data they need, departments and colleges are keeping data in legacy systems. In this age of social security (number) issues, that's very high-risk behavior.
"I think what we came to in the session is that we need to educate administrators about how to use data: First of all, how to think about the data, and how to ask the right questions about the data. So, there's a lot of work ahead of us.
"In the session we had people from small private universities and large public universities; community colleges; large and small systems… There were people from England; I think there were people in the room who were using each of the major ERPs; and there were representatives from some of the ERP vendors. And there were people from banks, who were trying to understand how we make decisions so that they can recommend us to funding agencies. So, it was a really nice mix of interests. And we're all grappling with the same questions: How do we ask the questions that we need to, and how do we get answers from the data that we have?"
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