News & Updates

Data, Dashboards, & Decisions!

February 17, 2020

Mike Sprague, director business intelligence and web services, and Marty Sweeney, director enterprise information systems, work with many others on campus to create “dashboards” that streamline access to data and thus decision-making ability for folks in multiple departments at Hamilton. Dashboards are integrated visualization tools that allow colleagues to harness data and filter data to make decisions. Sounds simple, right? A little exploring, however, reveals a highly developed ecosystem fueling Hamilton’s business intelligence processes. The data and dashboards provide state-of-the-art data analysis options to members of our community as they seek to improve the Hamilton experience.

What is the data and where does it live? Hamilton has developed a “Data Lake.” A data lake is a secure repository of data accessed and governed by the people who need it. To understand how dashboards work with data, it is important to understand data governance. There are massive lists of data. Each piece of data has to be carefully defined and those definitions agreed upon and entered into Hamilton’s Data Cookbook. For each data point, the following questions are answered: What does this piece of data mean and in what context? Where does it come from? How is it formatted? Who owns it? Who's the custodian of it? Who can access it? Who can change it? The goal of this governance is to ensure that there are never two different answers for the same question. Without knowing how the data was calculated you can't really fully understand the data and make decisions about it. For example, before this process, there were multiple answers to Hamilton’s number of enrolled students because there were different ways of calculating enrollment. Another example is “Class Year.” Class Year can be the degree year or the preferred reunion year. Now these differences are carefully defined through the process of data governance.

Once the data is governed it is put in the data lake and is available for integration in dashboards being developed for multiple departments on campus by Ryan Mortensen, business intelligence developer, and Todd Brown, business intelligence architect, under the management of Mike and Marty. A dashboard includes tools for visual representations of data. So you might see a bar chart about one area of data you are working on and a pie chart for another area. Quantitative data are visually represented to help in decision making. The enrollment committee, for example, might see how many students will be on campus in the fall. They can then use the dashboard to compare this data to last year’s data and project enrollment numbers. They can then decide how many students to recommend admitting in order to meet the college’s goals. It is important to note that data is not changed when it is viewed in the dashboard. The data sources are only being integrated through the dashboard program. Meanwhile, more data is generated daily.

These efforts began on campus as part of a large plan to modernize Hamilton’s Business Intelligence efforts. Overhauling Hamilton’s infrastructure to meet the needs of Digital Hamilton is a challenging project. Mike explains that rather than focusing on the multi-year enormous end goals for business intelligence, they are working incrementally to tackle this challenge with individual departments. There are massive lists of data. Instead of trying to define all of the data and then provide the tools to work with it, Hamilton has been working with individual departments and comparing data across campus in the governing process. Mike and his team strive toward a “thoughtful approach to giving people something that works for them now.” Working in increments to solve specific problems is more successful and keeps momentum going. They keep their eyes on the prize to ensure that gradual changes are tightly integrated across the data ecosystem. The Business Intelligence and Web Services team is working toward greater access to governed data visualized by dashboard tools that help inform decision making across campus. Ultimately, “this results in better experiences for Hamilton students.”