Yesterday, we wrote about how to make institutions flourish through better use of data…for management. But just as important as management is governance, and here, we would argue, a very different set of issues is at play.

Let’s start at the top, with Boards of Governors. As Alex has previously argued, Board members are fundamentally part-timers. They spend maybe 5-8 days worth of time a year doing their Boardly duties. They need to be kept focused. Giving Board members reams of data just because those reams happen to exist somewhere is a recipe for wasting their time. They do not need all that data. Some, if given that data, will start going a long way into the weeds, which is generally speaking not helpful for anyone (unless it’s the audit and finance committee—they occasionally do need to get into the weeds).

What they need, instead, is meaningful data. Data that helps them understand whether the institution is on track at a high level or not.

The absolute easiest way to do this is for institutions to adopt a set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) or a system of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) and have those in front of the Board at every meeting. Preferably, those KPIs or OKRs should be related to the institution’s strategic plan. Any other data that gets brought in needs to be a) pretty high-level, and b) related to existing indicators. Boards’ focus should be kept on a select few areas of the highest institutional priority and understanding the factors that drive results in each of these areas. Keep them meaningfully informed! But usually in cases like these, less is more. If you just hand out data and expect Board members to wade through it on their own, some will inevitably go for a long walk in the weeds. Focused, summary data is the key here—and it’s something that takes consistent, focused attention from Board Secretaries and Presidents. It might also require some internal capacity building—having people who both understand the institution’s data and how to provide it in ways the Board will find informative is important, but not something we see many places.

When we talk about data for governance, though, it’s a different story when it comes to the Senate (or Academic Council, or General Faculties Council, or whatever the supreme academic body is called in your neck of the woods). Senates are used to looking at data, but of a very different kind from what is needed to effectively govern an institution. The correct road for data with respect to Senates is therefore only partly about the data itself: it is also about how the Senate exercises its governance function.

Let’s start with the data issue. To be blunt: the issue is one of data abundance and trust. Senators—all faculty, actually—should have access to as much data as possible. As much as managers do (recall we spoke yesterday about what kinds of data managers should have). All too often in our institutions, faculty get the impression that management is hiding information. Occasionally they are right; more often than not, though, the data lacuna they bemoan is a reflection of the fact that universities often hide data from themselves (I am thinking in particular to the inability of department chairs and faculty being unable to obtain data on where their students come from, which is often the result of pure gatekeeping from the IR or Registrar’s office). Liberate the data! It will never do more harm than good; a university where more faculty and staff know the true state of university affairs will always be better off than one where data is scarce and unavailable.

We are not suggesting a purely laissez-faire approach to data. Data abundance is great, but without data literacy, it’s not all that helpful. Senates, in addition to their regular business, should have data briefings at every session as a matter of course. The point here is not to update them on all new data every couple of weeks, but over the course of a Senate year, the body should have briefings on all key data sources. Some would be finances, some would be about applications or enrollments, and one can easily imagine data briefings on areas like alumni affairs, infrastructure, graduate outcomes, student affairs and satisfaction, etc. Like the Board briefings we describe above, these would be high-level “key data,” not intended to waste Senators’ time, but with the crucial difference that Senators might be encouraged to dig deeper into the data with some links to the data itself. After a couple of years of focused data briefings of this nature, Senators would start to have familiarity with the institution’s operating environment as a whole.

But wait, you say—don’t Senators already have that? Well, no, not necessarily. Above all else, Senates (and the committee structures that feed them) are internal quality control mechanisms, ones which have been set up mostly to say yes or no to individual proposals for new programs or individual assessments of the quality of existing programs. What they are not in any sense equipped to do is to recognize opportunity costs and make choices between programs or create institutional policies in recognition of overall challenges in applications, enrollments, and the like.

And here’s where the Governance change may need to take place. I know of at least one institution where the idea of Senate being asked to use data to set academic and program priorities as being equivalent to “doing management’s dirty work for them,” which strikes us as a remarkably thorough abdication of Governance responsibility. In practice, if Senate is reluctant to think about corporate rather than disciplinary priorities, someone else makes the decision for them—Boards, primarily, but increasingly governments as well. Advocates of Senate supremacy can complain about this all they want, but fundamentally, if Senates wish to retain a sphere of authority, they are going to need to act corporately and strategically.

And they can’t do that without plentiful, high-quality data.

In any event, thanks for reading, and if you want to know more about how HESA and Plaid can help your institution flourish by using data more efficiently and imaginatively, please click here.