There is a lot of talk these days about technology’s impact on higher education. From artificial intelligence chatbots to data visualization tools to aggregators supporting student recruitment, we have entered a new era in terms of technology-enabled data collection, production, analysis, and reporting.

While higher education institutions have long served as bastions of knowledge, campus leaders have not always had the access, tools, or training to refine data into strategically relevant and actionable intelligence. On the contrary, most academic administrators are trained within a narrowly defined discipline or field and are subsequently conditioned to assess problems using a rather restricted body of knowledge.