For those Dashboard Spy readers out there who may be unfamiliar with the finer points of titles within the world of academia, “Provost” is usually the senior academic administrator. Think of him or her as the “Chief Academic Officer” of the university or college. The provost would report to the “CEO” of the college, usually titled President or Chancellor.

Anyway, getting back to executive dashboards, the point of this post is to bring out the fact that, just as in the corporate world, the academic management space is ripe for the growth of business intelligence dashboards. The provost has needs equivalent to a senior vice president within a business. There is a pressing need to manage the vast amounts of KPIs and metrics that surface every day.

Let’s look at an example dashboard that would be used by a provost. Thanks to long=time Dashboard Spy reader and contributor, Robert Allison (SAS/GRAPH Dashboarder and Guru), we have this example of a provost dashboard:

The dashboard is a big one with lots of fine detail, so be sure to click on the dashboard screenshot above to enlarge the image.

Click on the “read more” link below for the rest of this post.

The provost dashboard is sectioned by KPI groupings. The breakdown of the metrics categories is as follows:

• Students
• Admissions
• Instruction
• Faculty
• Continuing Education
• Student Success
• Finance

KPI on this dashboard include:

• Number of Students
• Retention Rates
• Graduation Rates for Student Athletes
• Applicant Pool
• Freshman Acceptance Rates
• Freshman GPA
• Minority Students
• International Students
• Student/Faculty Ratio
• Faculty Headcount
• Female Faculty
• Minority Faculty
• Faculty Compensation
• Faculty Retention
• Student Sucess
• Finances

Although straight-forward, first-time users of the dashboard will want to familiarize themselves with the legend to make sure they understand the trend indicators. There are red/green/black up and down arrows and large dots to indicate no change.

Tags: Provost Dashboard, College Dashboards, University Metrics