April 2008 — Features
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On the Road to DDDM
Stage 1: Define the outcomes.
PROJECT FUNDING IS SORTED OUT AND BROAD ORGANIZATION GOALS ARE SET.
The problem of inconsistent, "bad" data reared up publicly in a federal court case involving the district in 2003, Runcie says. "We had our law department, our budget department, research and accountability. We had another area called academic enhancement. They all were presenting data. The judge [said] it's hard to believe we're all working in the same place, because everybody is producing reports on the same data but they've all got different numbers."
The painful process of pinning down and defining data actually had real value, says Runcie. "That's one of the most significant benefits of doing business intelligence, dashboards, scorecards. It's not so much the data that's ultimately presented or what the scorecard looks like. There's value in going through the exercise, working with stakeholders, and thinking through how the organization runs and how it has been defining data."
Once the new systems for managing student information, human resources, and finances were in the works, CPS could exit Stage 3 of its data renovation and move on to Stage 4: giving users access to the information it was collecting so that the data could be cleaned up.
Stage 2: Define the questions.
PARTICIPANTS DECIDE WHAT QUESTIONS THEY WANT THE DATA TO ANSWER AND IDENTIFY THE ORGANIZATIONAL PROCESSES TIED TO GETTING THOSE ANSWERS.
"Data is very much an iterative process," says Raveen Rao, of Diamond Management & Technology Consultants and a project manager for the CPS initiative. "And a guiding principle that we went forward with was, if we don't expose this data to people and show that it's being used, it's never going to get clean."
Last December, the IMPACT team set up a soft launch for a dashboard it had created, allowing principals the chance to access their school's data to evaluate its accuracy. They were told, says Rao, "If it's not right as far as you can tell, let us know and we can work with you to get it right."
The initial release of the dashboard in January to principals, area officers, and central office administrators incorporated static reporting only. Users could view a small number of metrics. That will expand in the future to add additional metrics, the ability to slice and dice the data, and perform what-if scenarios.
To give those users a taste of what's in store for them, district senior leaders held a "CompStat" meeting with 120 high school principals. Fashioned after a process introduced in the New York City Transit Authority and later adopted by the New York City Police Department as a tool to track and reduce crime, CompStat brings together participants to evaluate computer statistics relating to their specific areas of management. "We basically challenged them to explain why the numbers were where they were at," Runcie says, "and what they were going to do to improve the situations in their schools and get those numbers to improve."
