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Data-Driven Decision Making
Dare To Share
5/1/2007
The ICE venture, in fact, wasn’t a nobrainer, Markwood recalls; it required a leap of faith. “I’ve never entered into a venture quite like that. It was a real learning curve for me,” he admits. “But we learned that we could trust each other; that we could give up things for the common good and that it would work out well for all of us. It’s very, very difficult for a small individual institution to make large computer purchases or things of that nature,” he adds. “But if we learn to do them together, we can.”
Team Cooperation
Three of the seven schools in the ICE consortium are located within 30 miles of each other, and several of the group’s members vie for the same students. But members insist that competition simply isn’t a problem: The data most at risk for these institutions involve donors and incoming students, but that information isn’t shared by the ICE schools. According to Markwood, “All of the separate institutional data are fire-walled, for one thing. So I can’t look at [a member school’s] admissions data or development files, even if I want to.”
As for strategic insight gleaned from the venture, members say that they’ve found the consortium hugely helpful. “ICE has been fantastic to work with,” Townsley says. “The other presidents have a real commitment to doing this and are very collegial.”
In fact, says Welch, “One of the things that came out of the [venture] was serendipitous: Because all the registrars were working together on the same tool, they learned from one another—somebody has figured out a way to do this, or someone has solved that problem. There have been some very real benefits.” He notes that all the individual institutions involved “would tell you that they’ve been able to help one another in very significant ways.”
One benefit that Markwood specifically cites is that of “teams” that have formed across school boundaries— teams in which registrars, admissions directors, development directors, and other administrators share knowledge. He explains: “These teams have developed their own networks [of people], so when, for instance, a registrar has an issue or question about using a software application, he or she can call another registrar at a member school and ask, ‘Have you ever dealt with this problem? How did you handle it?’”
From this benefit, too, there was an unintended by-product, says Markwood: The consortium was able to identify cores of expertise (such as financial aid or payroll proficiency) at each school. “We never would have been able to secure that level of expertise on a campus the size of 800 students,” he says. But because of ICE, he points out, the university now has a campus tantamount to almost 6,000 students.
Bigger Pools, Better Conclusions
Accordingly, another consortium benefit lies in the competitive advantage of having larger pools of data to work with, in order to come to critical decisions such as how much financial aid to offer students. “The greater the analyses of incoming students,” says Welch, “the better able you are to determine how much aid you need to give them in order to get them to come.” That means, “The smarter you are, the better you’re able to compete,” he says plainly.
Recommended Reading
- 2008 Campus Technology Innovators: Enhanced Learning/ Assessment
- 2008 Campus Technology Innovators: High-Performance Computing
- 2008 Campus Technology Innovators: Interactive, Remote Learning
- 2008 Campus Technology Innovators: Mobile Learning
- 2008 Campus Technology Innovators: Network Security
- 2008 Campus Technology Innovators: Social Networking for Admissions
