>> Announcer: Live, from Orlando Florida It's theCUBE! Covering Pentaho World 2017. Brought to you by Hitachi Ventara. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Pentaho World brought to you by Hitachi Ventara I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Dave Vellante, we're joined by Brendan Aldrich he is the chief data officer at Ivy Tech which is Indiana's community college system Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you very much I appreciate it. >> And congratulations because I know that you've just won the Pentaho Excellence Award for the Social Impact category. At Ivy Tech you are you using the power of data to combat one of the toughest problems in education higher education drop out rate so tell us a little bit about what you're doing and how you're using data. >> Certainly, well Ivy Tech has been really one of the more innovative players in the higher education space when it comes to how we're utilizing data. Both from the work that data engineering and our chief technology officer has done to the work we're doing now from my area to make that data very useful and very usable for the organization. And we're tackling it on multiple fronts. We're using data in order to help more quickly identify students that have already completed the requirements to graduate. Or if they are close to or have already potentially completed the requirements to graduate on another major other than their declared major and starting those conversations with the students. >> And what about the drop out too so you are obviously also looking at students that are at risk. >> We've been engaged in a project called Project Early Success where we work in the first two weeks of a 16 week term to identify which students we believe are at risk for failure. And then we spend the next two weeks, weeks 3 and 4 of the term coordinating hundreds of faculty staff and administrators to reach out and try to talk to those students and see if we can move them back on track. The first term that we did that we saw a great success with, we, by mid-term were showing a 3.3 percentage point drop in our number of D's and F's being reported. For an organization our size, that meant over 3000 students, more student, who were passing their courses at mid-term as compared to failing them, compared to the year before. >> Scope of the organization? Student size? >> Ivy Tech, we are Indiana state wide community college system so we have 19 campuses, almost 9000 employees and we educate around 160 000 students per year. >> Wow. So just getting back to that college drop out, so professors are putting in the data about who's going to class, who's not going to class >> Brendan: That's right. >> The grades that their getting. And then that's all being fed in and you're finding out who the at risk people are, and it's really just reaching out to them and it's saying "Hey, what's going on?" >> Absolutely. And in fact a lot of the work was done with our engineering team to actually identify data that related to the behaviors of the students. So it's not just their attendance it's not just previous performance in similar classes. But it's really finding those data elements that relate to behaviors of the students that we believe are going to put them on a less successful track. >> Brendan I wonder if we can talk about the role of the Chief Data Officer. When we talk to CDO's in for profit organizations they always say we start with an understanding of how data can help with our monetization strategies. Now let's translate that for a community college. Is that a reasonable starting point if I frame it as how data adds value to the organization is that where you started and take us through sort of the journey of your role. >> Absolutely. Well first of all Chief Data Officers in higher education are still fairly rare. At the time Ivy Tech hired me in December of 2015 I was only the 9th Chief Data Officer working at any college or university in the country. And the first that had been appointed at a two year college. So whereas a public institution like ours is not necessarily as driven by profitability students success is something that's very high on our priority list and being sure that we were able to make data very available to everyone in the organization that was working with our students so that they could use that data to more directly target the areas that they could help the student best. Now there can be profitability components as a public institution we do receive funds from the state, performance funding for students who successfully graduate. In some ways we've been able to use data to help our registrars identify those students more quickly. Which certainly gives us a lot of opportunity not only to help the students on their own educational goals and careers but to be able to increase the amount of performance funding that Ivy Tech receives from the state as well. >> So that you brought to the other point CDO's tell us is data access, making that data accessible. And then there's a trust component too. It's got to be reliable and it's hard with all this data and all this data growth is how are you addressing kind of those challenges? >> One of the things that's really unique about how we're approaching data at Ivy Tech is this idea of a data democracy. It's more than self-service business intelligence or self-service analytics. Because instead of just providing access we wanted to make sure that once our employees had access, that the data was intuitive. That it was relevant to their responsibilities. That it was interactive. So that as their needs and challenges and questions evolved they could continue to use data to answer those questions without having to go back to a central IT team or a central research team. So the data democracy is a really unique aspect of ours that was important to us and I think at the moment we have about 4000 of our employees trained and running on our platform today. >> So everybody wants to be data driven these days your job is to actually affect that data driven initiative. Culturally, people say they're data driven but they don't necessarily act that way. They still act on gut feel and this is the way we've always done it. How have you been able to affect the cultural transformation? >> Well it's important to remember that if you can make the right data available to the people who are ready to use it, that's a transformational opportunity. For us, before we began on this project less than 2% of our employee base actually had the ability to create a report. Everyone else had to make requests wait for data to be made available it could take time and maybe that data wasn't available by the time they actually needed it. So if you think about that, moving from a place where less than 2% of our employees had access to data to a point where we're approaching 50% of our employees now having really good access to data we didn't want just a few silver bullets we feel that every one of our employees has the potential, if they have the right data available to test their ideas with data and come up with brand new, innovative ideas. So we could have thousands of silver bullets coming to rise throughout our organization. >> So give us some examples, I mean we've talked a little bit about how the data is transforming the student experience and student success rate but how, what are some of your grand ideas about how faculty and how employees can use data to test ideas and make their lives easier and make Ivy Tech more successful. >> Oh absolutely. And even if you think about Project Early Success and the idea that we were helping to identify students that we believe may be struggling behaviorally in being successful in their courses. Now if you can take that as an attribute and you can surface it through our system to the employees that are using it which includes our faculty. Our faculty members now have the ability to see very quickly which of their students may be struggling and have the chance to intervene with those students as well on a regular basis. So it's not just one phone call at the beginning of the term. It's not just Project Early Success but now what we're talking about as Project Student Success how do we continue to use that kind of information to engage the student over the entire course of the term to ensure that we're not just changing their trajectory a little bit in the beginning but that we're following that journey with them over the course of their educational goal. >> Can you talk about the regime in your organization? The reporting structure, to whom do you report is there a CIO- >> Brendan: There is. >> What's the relationship there? >> There is a CIO who I report to the Chief Technology Officer and I both report to the CIO and we had a recent change in our leadership within the organization as well. Back a year ago this last July we have a new president of the state wide organization Dr. Sue Ellspermann who was formerly our lieutenant governor for the state of Indiana. >> So that's interesting that you report to the CIO. Most Chief Data Officers, we find, I wonder if you can comment don't report to the CIO there's sort of a parallel organization for a variety of reasons. People generally believe that well, it maybe one day was the CIO's job it's sort of the CIO's job morphed into kind of keeping the lights on and the infrastructure going, but what do you see amongst your colleagues with that regard? >> You know what's important for me and I think that if you look at every organization across the country there is this data knowledge gap. This idea that you've got your IT and engineering staff that knows everything there is about how to build, support, augment and de-commission these systems but generally have not been as involved in what the data means inside those systems or what decisions are being made off that data. On the other half of that gap you've got all of the rest of your organization the people that are using data who know what it means and who are making decisions from it but generally don't know enough about how to think about structuring that data so that they could get the engineering teams to build them new tools. This is really the place where a Chief Data Officer in my mind comes to sit. Because my goal is to build those bridges between the organization so that we can help engineering learn more about what we're doing as an organization with data and then use that information to build tools that will drive the rest of the organization closer to those goals through data. >> Now you're not a bank so you've got, I'm imagining a pretty small team. >> Brendan: We do. >> So maybe you can talk about that and how you manage with such a small team. >> You know it's interesting most organizations when you think about a build versus buy scenario you think about well I don't have a lot of people I don't have a lot of bandwiths, maybe we need to buy. Now Ivy Tech went through that process and every one of the RP's that came back were too expensive We couldn't afford to do it. So as a team we had to sit down and think about how do we really rethink the way that we approach this in order to still accomplish what we need out of data and out of our data warehouse and analytic systems. Part of what I'll be speaking at the conference today is some of those entrenched data practices that we had to overcome or rethink and rewrite in order to get to where we are today. >> Well Brendan it's been so much fun having you on theCUBE, thanks so much. >> Well thank you, I appreciate it. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante you are watching theCUBE, we will have more from Pentaho World in just a little bit. (electronic music)