Question of the Month

Mine - Happy customers! J

Happy holidays everyone!

Hello All!

I hope you had a very merry Christmas and I wish nothing but the best for you and yours in this coming new year.  My Christmas wish and New Year’s Resolution (rolled into one) is to have a more active Constituent Group this year!  Some of you may refrain from commenting on Listserv messages – the reasons are numerous:

·         The question was answered

·         You don’t feel like you know enough to answer

·         You’re shy

·         You don’t want to

I can assure you that when a question / comment is posted to the listserv, the author would LOVE to have a LOT of feedback from YOU.  Yes, really.  YOU.  If you’re brand new to metrics, IT, or higher Ed – your viewpoint is valuable as a new person in the arena.  You see things differently than those who have been buried under piles of the stuff for months (or years).  If you’ve been doing metrics for years – your viewpoints are valuable as an experienced practitioner.  We need your input!

Here’s the question of the month – In the spirit of the New Year (and stealing from other CG Listserv’s I’ve seen), What magazines, websites, or associations do you belong to for the purpose of keeping up with Metrics (theory, concepts, or practice)? They don’t have to be Higher Ed related, nor IT related.  Just metrics related.   I’ll start us off:

Magazines/Ezines:

Educause Quarterly and Educause Review (scarce pickings out there)

Websites:

XPC Palladium  http://www.thepalladiumgroup.com/communities/xpc/Pages/Welcome.aspx

Groups/Associations:

LinkedIn Groups

1.       IT Performance Management

2.       Lean Six Sigma

3.       Performance Measurement

4.       Organizational Development Network

5.       IT Metrics – CEITPS

CEITPS  www.ceitps.org

Marty

Martin Klubeck, MA
Strategy & Planning Consultant
Office of Information Technologies

359 ITC
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, IN 46556
(574)-631-5447
Web:  www.org-immaturity.com

DTRT  TRW  TFT

It's your day, what are you going to do with it?

Computer Aid, INC - http://www.compaid.com/

Hello All,

Martin, your message encouraged me to write – thanks for the boost!

I’m new to the group and I’d appreciate any input that anyone wants to share. I’m the Service Level Manager at Boston University’s IS&T organization. We’ve got ServiceNow running and I spent some time during the holiday week putting my toe in the water of Crystal Reports. I wonder if anyone has any reporting experience with either of these tools, can recommend a training course for Crystal, or any other insights at all. We’re working to get monthly metrics around the services we’ve defined in our service catalog and I’m aimed to automate what I can.

Best to you for a happy and healthy new year and thanks again for any insights.

Hillary Rosenfeld
Associate Director – Service Level Management

Information Services & Technology
Boston University
T (617)353-8050
F (617)353-6260

hillaryr@bu.edu

http://www.bu.edu/tech

Hello All!

I hope you had a very merry Christmas and I wish nothing but the best for you and yours in this coming new year.  My Christmas wish and New Year’s Resolution (rolled into one) is to have a more active Constituent Group this year!  Some of you may refrain from commenting on Listserv messages – the reasons are numerous:

·         The question was answered

·         You don’t feel like you know enough to answer

·         You’re shy

·         You don’t want to

I can assure you that when a question / comment is posted to the listserv, the author would LOVE to have a LOT of feedback from YOU.  Yes, really.  YOU.  If you’re brand new to metrics, IT, or higher Ed – your viewpoint is valuable as a new person in the arena.  You see things differently than those who have been buried under piles of the stuff for months (or years).  If you’ve been doing metrics for years – your viewpoints are valuable as an experienced practitioner.  We need your input!

Here’s the question of the month – In the spirit of the New Year (and stealing from other CG Listserv’s I’ve seen), What magazines, websites, or associations do you belong to for the purpose of keeping up with Metrics (theory, concepts, or practice)? They don’t have to be Higher Ed related, nor IT related.  Just metrics related.   I’ll start us off:

Magazines/Ezines:

Educause Quarterly and Educause Review (scarce pickings out there)

Websites:

XPC Palladium  http://www.thepalladiumgroup.com/communities/xpc/Pages/Welcome.aspx

Groups/Associations:

LinkedIn Groups

1.       IT Performance Management

2.       Lean Six Sigma

3.       Performance Measurement

4.       Organizational Development Network

5.       IT Metrics – CEITPS

CEITPS  www.ceitps.org

Marty

Martin Klubeck, MA
Strategy & Planning Consultant
Office of Information Technologies

359 ITC
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, IN 46556
(574)-631-5447
Web:  www.org-immaturity.com

DTRT  TRW  TFT

It's your day, what are you going to do with it?

Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA)

Specifically for COBIT or Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology

One more…

The Campus Computing Survey

http://www.campuscomputing.net/survey

Good day all!

So, what exactly is Analytics?  I attended the Midwest Regional Educause Conference and the hot topic seemed to be “analytics.”  I attended more than one session/meeting on the topic.  There was even a “write-in” lunch session on it (we also had our IT Metrics session of course).  So what is “analytics?”  Is it just  a new term for Metrics?  I wouldn’t be surprised to find a new CG arise titled analytics and if it does, I’m wondering if I’ll have to join it to stay on top of all-things-metrics.

What do you all think?  What is it?  And how does it differ from Metrics?

Marty

Martin Klubeck, MA
Strategy & Planning Consultant
Office of Information Technologies

359 ITC
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, IN 46556
(574)-631-5447
Web:  www.org-immaturity.com

DTRT  TRW  TFT

It's your day, what are you going to do with it?

Marty, et al

As we (at Syracuse) are trying to move more into the Analytics arena, I’m interested to see this thread.  Unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend the conference but have corresponded a bit – and looked at Susan G’s PowerPoint from the conference.

With a bit of reading and perusing things, my minimal (but hopefully growing) understanding would lead me to think that analytics is not (just) a new term for metrics in some ways.  Some use the term analytics and business intelligence interchangeably…though the corporate world seems to favor BI more than higher ed.

I’ve heard / seen many definitions – actually EDUCAUSE ELI wrote a document about establishing a common language for analytics in higher ed.  A couple that I like are:

·         By “analytical” we mean the use of analysis, data and systematic reasoning to make decisions

·         Business Analytics:=Delivering right decision support to right people at right time….aka “decision support for business decisions.”

I believe some might think analytics the superset inclusive of metrics.  However, from at least some of what I’ve heard you mention, I think the way you think of metrics might lead you to disagree.  Analytics is partially about determining the story from information so you can make decisions.  And at last year’s Annual conference presentation that you and Leah did, I clearly remember this as part of how you two think about the topic.

The thing I like about the second “definition” above is the author explicitly says the decision support is done through Information Systems composed of (1) technology components, (2) human competencies, and (3) business processes.

My two cents worth,

Andy

Well, here’s a link to what the “big kids” an INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and Management Science) think - http://www.informs.org/Community/Analytics . 

Great conversation!  I’ve always used Metrics to mean “the use of data, measures, and information (and other metrics) to tell a complete story”  and a “good” metric to be “the use of data, measures, and information (and other metrics) to tell a complete story in answer to a root question.” 

So, when I hear the term “analytics” I didn’t know what it was.  My initial thought was that it was the practice of analyzing the information to derive at the answer.  It’s what I do to with the metrics to decide how to report, display, or communicate the answer. 

Marty

Marty,

You seem to distinguish between Metrics (see your definition below) and metrics (used within your definition below).  Perhaps Metrics is Analytics, but I would guess that metrics are more along the lines of Descriptive Analytics (thanks for the link to INFORMS, Wayne!). 

Typically we use metrics (little m) as indicators of what’s happened.  The root questions are usually: How well are we doing? How fast are we doing it? Do our customers like us?  Are we efficient?  Are we effective?  Are our employees happy?  Mostly retrospective stuff that we monitor on a periodic basis. 

I love that INFORMS calls out two other components of analytics: Predictive Analytics (what could happen?) and Prescriptive Analytics (what needs to change?).  The root questions here are very different and arguably more complicated to answer.  Indicators w/ questionable accuracy wouldn’t work with these questions even though they’re perfectly useful for Descriptive Analytics. 

As for whether Metrics and Analytics are the same:  I’d say that although the act of answering 3 different, complicated root questions would require “the use of data, measures, and information (and other metrics) to tell a complete story,” I’d argue that that’s not all it requires.  Maybe Analytics is more like “the use of data, measures, and information (and other metrics) to tell a complete story, the prequel and the sequel…and also a post-game analysis of how the story could have been better”

So I’d say metrics are part of Analytics….and Analytics are not Metrics alone.  Also, a square is a rectangle but a rectangle is not necessarily a square.;)

-Leah