Karin Fischer - The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 14, 2010

At the recent meeting of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Soumitra Dutta, a professor of business and technology at Insead, critiqued higher education for largely missing the opportunity to use the recession to stimulate significant change.  Even with a "dose of hot water" caused by the recession, Mr. Dutta said, most universities have tinkered at the margins, freezing faculty recruitment and reducing administrative expenses, rather than taking a hard look at how they do business.

This theme was carried forward by Peter Smith, Vice President for Academic Strategies and Development, who observed that a student-centric, employment-focused experience was desired by students seeking to lift out of recession.  "Do it better, cheaper, or more appropriately—that's the metric for universities," he said...

Paul Jansen, McKinsey & Company - Forum on the Future of Higher Education, June 16, 2009

This presentation explores the likely impacts of the Great Recession on higher education.  It traces reactions to past recessions. It suggests the possibilities for institutional strategies to weather the storm.  These three strategies are 1) bridging, 2) “don’t waste a good crisis” and 3) through cycle.  The through cycle approach involves: 1)  We will not waste the crisis in terms of resetting our internal cost and will use our aggressive approach to shift resources to strategic priorities and 2) We will exploit weaknesses in competitors to acquire new customers, talent and competitors.

Dennis Jones, NCHEMS - SHEEO Annual Meeting, July 17, 2009

This presentation confronts two harsh, countervailing forces: 1) higher expectations for increased enrollment and baccalaureate production and 2) diminished financial resources and increasing minority demographics that in combination make raising enrollments problematic.  Dennis Jones suggests a combination of short-term and longer-term measures necessary to address this untenable situation.

Donald Norris and Joan Leonard - Strategic Initiatives, Inc., March 10, 2008

This white paper compares the approaches which institutions can follow to build or buy advanced analytic applications that combine data warehouse capabilities, extract transfer and load (ETL), online analytic processing (OLAP), business intelligence tools, and presentation and visualization capabilities.  The paper review the questions campus leadership should answer in addressing their analytic needs.

Donald Norris, Linda Baer, Joan Leonard, Louis Pugliese, and Paul Lefrere - EDUCAUSE Review, January/February 2008

This is the article from EDUCAUSE Review that defined Action Analytics, a revived approach to analytics that didn’t just enable action, but demanded it.  Action Analytics capitalizes on Web 2.0 technologies and the demands for greater accountability and performance improvement to set a new standard for analytics-guided initiatives that spanned PK-20, linked work and learning, and focused on the need to perpetually fill fresh knowledge.  This article also describes the organizational capacity building and change management necessary to achieve action analytics.