Thursday, June 11, 2015

Benchmarking to Inform Planning: The EDUCAUSE Core Data Service - Leah Lang, EDUCAUSE Review

To run their institutions efficiently and effectively, leaders at today's colleges and universities must have a clear understanding of their own financial, staffing, and operational status. This information is critical to making informed decisions and optimizing the impact of information technology. Leaders can enhance their decision making by evaluating their financial, staffing, and operational status against comparable information for peers, aspirant peers, or even their own institution. For example, a metric on total central IT spending per institutional FTE (students, faculty, and staff) can be used to estimate the amount of IT support that individuals at an institution receive. Benchmarking this metric against peer institutions or an institution's past performance can help leaders make the case for additional resources. http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/benchmarking-inform-planning-educause-core-data-service