So we had an issue or
challenge of getting people the data they needed
especially you know data for just everyday tasks. We used to print a book
it was a big book of just stats for our office
and for the university. That’s a very
time-consuming process. And so before SAS we
just had to do that. And it was just a
very manual process. So we provided data in a
big institutional profile. It was printed. It was one time a year. And as soon as we
printed that it, we had requests to have that
updated for another college or another Dean. And that took a lot of time. It would take 2 or 3 weeks
just to get the printing right because things
changed, charts changed because of different
stats that people want. So we weren’t being able to
give them the data they needed in a quick manner. Now we can update that data
every day if we need to. But we provide that
data once a semester now instead of once a year. And then they can update it
themselves anytime they want. They can go change the
stats that they want, they can change the
graphs that they want. They can change the population
of students they want in a way that we can just
ever do before SAS. But now with SAS, we
can do it dynamically. We can have people do their own
reports for themselves and it’s just really kind of changed the
way we deliver data to people. SAS provided us a platform
where we could really look at data in a new way and
in new formats and in ways that we never thought
possible for us just because of the systems that we
had in place at the time. We needed something that
was not just visuals. We needed something that could
do the statistics that could do the predictive analytics. We also need something
that could handle the data management needs that we have. We’re a large institution. We have multiple campuses. We have multiple
institutions that we manage. And so we needed a
way to manage the data for all of those students in
all of the different forms and we have. And so we needed a
tool that could do that and SAS was the only
one we could find. Before SAS all of our
data was presented in charts or in tables. And so was sometimes
just numbers. And so now with SAS
Visual Analytics, we can actually see the
data, we can see trends, they jumped out at you. It really lets us show the
capabilities of data and data science and really impact
our university in ways that we never thought possible. We created a report this
year that we called a “grade distribution report”. It was a report that
we’ve had before. It was very specific
to a specific office. And so a college
might say, we need to know our grade distribution
for this specific course. And so they would just look
at the grade distributions. Say we had this many A’s, this
many B’s this many C’s and they might look at it over time. But what we weren’t able to do
was look at the whole picture, look at the whole picture
of how grading was done at our institution. Were we having more A’s given,
more B’s earned more C’s earned? More D’s? Were people withdrawing at
rates that we didn’t really look at because we’re only doing
that on a case by case basis? And so this year we
created to report that looked over the past 4
years at grade distribution and looked at the
change of those grades. And it really changed the
way that our faculty look- think about grade distribution. They thought it was punitive. And it’s not punitive. It’s really a way to see OK,
are things that we’re changing in the curriculum making
students more successful? And so we can look at
those things over time now in a very detailed
level or very macro level and look at the
whole university. And so that grade distribution
report came out just a few weeks ago for our campus and
it’s already changed the way some of the faculty members are
talking about how they teach. They can show that, oh my gosh 2
years ago my grade distribution was you know 80% A’s B’s and C’s
and then it was 20% failures. Now it’s 30% failures. What happened? Did the student body change? We’re the people coming
into our class different? Did my teaching change? Was something going on
with me that semester? And so those are all
things that are questions that we can answer
now or think about that we never were before. Before we were just saying,
we had an 80% success rate and a 20% failure rate. Now we can say, we have an 80%
failure rate and we know why. We know why those 80% of
people are succeeding. And we know why the
20% are failing. We’ve also looked at things
like classroom utilization, just how we use our space. As a state institution
resources are really important for us
and the dwindling resources that we have. And so we wanna make sure
that we are using everything to our disposal in the best way. And so we were able to use SAS
to modify a process that we’d been doing for years of very
manual process and a process actually we hadn’t updated in 5
or 6 years just because it was so manual. Where we would go in
and we had someone that would sit down and make
checkmarks in a spreadsheet to determine when
classes were being used, how many people were
in a specific time slot across campus. So, we do a lot of research
on our student growth in this major, our
students growth overall, the changes in the curriculum,
you know those kind of things. But then we started
saying, really? Do we need another
building to do that? Couldn’t we just use the
buildings we have better? And so this process saved us
time in not doing this research that we didn’t really need to
do in the growth of a campus and on the growth
of the program. We could just really focus
on what we already had. How could we use the
resources we had better? And so it just
really changed how we talk about our space
utilization and our seat utilization. And so it’s really helped us
kind of think about problems in a new way and solve those
problems in a new way just because it’s just easier. Our users really love SAS. They often comment
about they just love how they can get any time
anywhere and look at the data. And so for us, SAS Visual
Analytics has given them the power to just look at
the data and see things that they’ve never seen before. They “nerd-out” a little bit
on the data and they like that. And so for us, we
like that as well. Because then they’re
answering their own questions. And then they’re allowing
us to do other things. Research more, do other
topics of research. So, it’s been great for them. Our executives love it as well. They’d like to go in and just
be able to open up one report and see all the
information they need. So we’ve been able to create
dashboards that pull together many sources of data. For an executive that’s
on a run to a meeting, they can pull it up on their
iPad and look at the data, know what they need to know
for the meeting and move on. It’s not something they have to
call us 2 weeks ahead of time so we can put together a chart
and print it out for them and run it over to their office. A lot of the time now they
just pull up their iPad or on their phone
and just look at it and like okay, now I know
what I need to know and go on. We have had comments before from
our administration about how now that data is out there
for everyone that this data because we’re making it
available to most people on campus that they didn’t
have to provide the data, explain it before the meeting. They could come into
a meeting having all of the data already looked at. They can just start
discussing the issue at hand. For us, data
analytics has really changed the way we
think about data and think about how
we answer questions. And so for us, it’s really about
giving people the basic data and then really thinking
about the next question. And for us, it’s always
about the next question. What is the next thing
we need to be doing? We don’t need to be
counting students anymore. We need to be talking about why
that count is the way it is. Why are those students, the
student population growing? Why is it getting smaller? What can we do to improve that? So for us, it’s
changed the questions. It’s really changed the way that
we think about our problems. It’s no longer, oh
we can find you know, get the data and have another
meeting and look at the data. It’s, here’s the data. It’s already here. But now can we model? Can we do some
predictive modeling on why these students
are successful? What we could be doing to
help them be more successful? We know things are happening
and we know trends are going on. But now we’re trying
to figure out why. We’re trying to figure out the
things that we can do to make those trends go in
the direction we want. If we want something
to be better or something to slow down. We’re working on the ways to
identify how to do things. And so that’s a lot different
than just pointing out that a trend is happening. Now we can say, “This
trend is happening. Here are three ideas that we’ve
come up with on how we can change that.” So for us, it’s really
changed the conversation. It’s no longer about
just counts of things. It’s about how we
can do things better. And for me, that’s
really important. In about 5 months we were able
to the source and purchase and have our first report
out which was our factbook. And so it was really important
for us that we give some quick wins to our administration
to show them that of the investment that we’ve
made not only money but in time was- it was valuable. And so we’re able to push out
a report that they had seen as a static document for years
that they carried around that was bound and printed
and not a great document. But it was something that every
university produces and they’ve always done it. And so we were able to
put that out in a way that they could
take it with them on their phone or their iPad. They didn’t have
to print it out. They could really
filter down the results of the factbook to the
specific college or even a specific department or
even just a group of students to see how um, that
has changed over time. And just something we
weren’t able to do before. And then really expand that to
doing multi-year comparisons. And so instead of just putting
out one factbook and saying, here’s a result of 2017 or
18, here’s the results of 17, 18 and 19 and how 19 compares
to 17 in ways that we couldn’t ever do before with
a static document. So SAS helped us out a
lot with showing value. They gave us ideas
on some things that we could do quickly, that
they knew we could do quickly. Because they were with us
through the whole process. They knew what the goals
were for our organization. They knew our data
because they had helped us move some
of that data over and really try to get
ready for Visual Analytics. And so SAS helped us
identify what would give us the best wins based on their
knowledge of the product and what it could do
and just their knowledge of our institution. And then they also gave us some
ideas on here’s what you should do to really show them
that this is more amazing. Like, no one else is doing this. Why don’t y’all do
it, show it to us, show it to your campus so
they can see the value of it and really help out
your institution, maybe other campuses as well. SAS has been a
great partner for us in getting our solutions
implemented on campus. We use SAS Consulting. We also have used SAS, the free
solutions of SAS Community. We also use our
just SAS contacts. You know, people that
we’ve met over time. You call them or send them an
e-mail in they’re great about sending back solutions or
possible ways to look at this problem or someone else to
contact that might be able to help you. Or another campus that’s
doing what you’re doing. And so SAS has been
invaluable to that. For us, it was key to
have executive buy-in. We had support from the
top our VP for our office also works for IT. And so having his
support was invaluable. Having him say, you know what? This is something we
need to be able to do. This office needs to
be able to do this. We need the support
financially to do that, but we also need
the support from IT, from other data
sources, to make sure that this is working correctly. So having that executive
buy-in was key to our success. Having executive buy-in really
helped other people know that it was important that we weren’t
just on our mission to have this new system. That it really was important
for the university system-wide to have “one source of data” in
a way that people would use it and it was visual and that was
giving data to more people that needed it when they needed it. So I think also for changing
culture it’s really important to get buy-in. Giving people access to data
gives you a really good way to get buy-in. There’s people out
there starving for it. And if you can give
it to them it also gives you a way to
explain the data, explain what you think the
data means, get their insights and really kind of get them to
buy into the culture as well. It’s like, oh we really need
to be using data to inform our decisions. Not these anecdotes. Using real data. And giving them the
data is the first step. But then also sitting down
with them explaining the data, really getting to understand
how they understand the data and what it means is going
to be also important. We do a lot of training sessions
with our faculty and staff to talk about just
basic reports, how to access them,
how to use Cowboy Data Roundup as we call it. But it’s also important to
have training on what the data means. You know, giving someone
access to the amount of A’s B’s and C’s they have is great. But what does that mean? How does that impact
the university? How could that impact you
by understanding your data? And so that’s really important. And we have spent a lot of time
training our faculty and staff and having opportunities
for them to ask us questions and really kind of explain
data to them in a way that they can understand it
and make sure they use it. Because ultimately that’s what
we want is for them to use the data. And so giving them
the information they need is important but
training them how to use it is also important. But it also gives you an
opportunity to hear from them. Oh, I didn’t realize that. Or why- what’s
this next- what’s- here’s another question
that this raises for me. Which when they’re using the
data and they’re on the ground level that’s really important
getting those ground-level questions. I think SAS offers an
institution that’s really interested in having a
data-informed kind of culture they give you the
tools that you need. All of the tools. They give you the
tools to make sure that your data is
structured in the way it needs to be structured
to answer the questions. Gives you the statistics
background you need to validate your questions
validate the data, validate the trends
that you’re seeing. But it also gives you the
ability to think about what’s next. You can learn- use
machine learning, which is not something that
a lot of people in higher Ed are doing. Use machine learning
to help you figure out some of these trends. It gives you the tools that
you can do those things. Increasingly our world is judged
by how businesses are operating especially in higher education. And so we need to be
using the cutting edge tools to show the value
to our constituents to our legislatures
to our regulators that we are doing
everything possible. We’re using data. We’re using every
statistical model out there. We’re using every tool at
our disposal to show results, to show that the
value of what we do. We currently use SAS in our
office to do a lot of reporting and a lot of analytics. But we’re going to expand that
into working with our other branch campuses and agency
campuses that we have so that they can also use SAS. So we’ll use SAS across all of
the institutions in our system soon. But also trying to learn, doing
more… predictive modeling, predicting why certain
things are happening. And using SAS and all the tools
it has available to do that for many offices across campus
not just with student data but with HR data,
with finance data, figuring out why we’re spending
so much money on one thing or how, you know, has there
been an increase in how we’re spending things? Those are all
interesting things that I think SAS gives us
the ability to look at that we have been doing yet.