Written Assignment

Arizona State University began implementing dashboards in 2006 once it realized that most staff members found the university's self-service reporting system too difficult to use. The goal was to convert the most widely used reports into dashboards and give everyone equal access to information.

Our dashboards are designed to give users 40 percent to 60 percent of the information they need to do their jobs, regardless of the technical resources in their department, says John Rome, director of development and data warehousing at ASU.

The first dashboard ASU built was a big success. It tracked research proposals, awards, and expenditures by college, department, and principal investigator every month. For the first time, the university had a single source of truth about research dollars, a critical source of funding for the university. Once the president began using the dashboard, as described in the opening scenario, the deans, department heads, and faculty did so as well. This was the tipping point for dashboards, says Rome.

Continue to research the work being done with data at Arizona State University. In a 2-3 page APA formatted paper, describe in detail how Arizona State sources and mines the data to create their dashboards. What kind of information did the dashboards reveal and what could Arizona State do with the results to improve things at the university?

Be sure to use proper citations and references within your paper.