1. What is your job title?
Director of Planning & Business Intelligence at The University of Queensland (UQ).
Five Questions with Clare Hourigan
The University of Queensland, Australia
Clare chose to be interviewed in chair #9
2. Briefly, how would you describe your role in terms of your place in your institution?
Two words come to mind when I think of my role: varied and unpredictable. The joke is that you can rarely plan out the daily work of a Planning Office because you never really know what’s going to pop up around the corner. You must be adaptable and comfortable with constantly reprioritising your work. This can be challenging, but also makes things really interesting.
At its core, my job, and the function of my unit, is to provide management and the broader university community with the data and information they need to make both operational and strategic decisions. More specifically, we are responsible for functions such as the development and maintenance of the University’s data warehouse and data reporting, student load and income projections, target setting for domestic undergraduate admissions, strategic and operational planning, student data submissions to the Australian Government, management of national student surveys, provision of government policy advice and ad-hoc analytics.
On a day-to-day basis, I spend a lot of my time providing support, advice and analysis to our senior executive. This might include developing the University’s response to a Government proposal, providing a market analysis of our student applications, sitting in on budget meetings with our faculties and institutes, preparing a strategy session for a management retreat, or participating in a committee that guides the University’s IT strategy.
3. From your perspective, what are the emerging areas of interest in institutional research?
Over the last few years our institutional research work (or strategic analysis as I tend to call it) has well and truly moved away from simply describing historical trends and measuring past performance. That work still occurs, but we are now shifting towards analysis that describes what the future might look like in the event of various environmental changes, or if specific decisions are made. We try to predict the likely outcome of future decisions, rather than just examine whether past decisions had the intended effect.
At UQ, the evolution of our student load planning is a key example of this. We started building our student load and income model about five years ago, and its aim was to simply provide income projections for the budget, and to prepare offer targets for coursework admissions. The modelling process, and the data it produces, are now used for a range of different purposes. For example, we regularly use the model to undertake ‘what if’ scenario modelling to manage the risk of unexpected changes in the external environment (e.g. funding changes, significant shifts in the size of various markets, etc.). We also know that our faculties and schools use the output to better understand student load and income flows, and to plan new courses and programs. In the future, I envisage that we might also build upon the load model to inform timetabling, workforce planning, and to better predict our costs.
Institutional Research (IR) is not just about doing a contained piece of institutional-wide analysis and writing up the results, but it is also about using what you have discovered to provide tools, reports and dashboards, that allow others to interrogate the data for their own purposes. This might be a student administration manager who wants to measure the financial viability of their courses, an academic who wants to understand the background of their students to inform their teaching practice, or an international student recruiter who wants to know more about their student market. For IR to be successful, it is vital that a university’s planning and business intelligence functions work closely together. Data reporting and dissemination can only be truly effective if it is informed by a deep understanding of the operating environment and business needs.
4. What do you believe will be the future priorities for institutional research?
One of the current key challenges and priorities for both my team and our IT Services area is how to deal with the increasing availability of new and complex administrative data, and manage the demand and expectations around that data. As examples, Wi-Fi logs, learning management system clicks, building access logs and customer relationship management systems are new data sources that all have the potential to support analysis that addresses IR and planning questions. There is a lot of excitement around the potential of these data, but we also need to contain some of the hype. In an environment where ‘big data’ and ‘artificial intelligence’ have become common lexicon, it’s easy to slip into focussing on the data or the solution before clearly articulating the question or problem. When a problem isn’t clearly understood, the risk of producing a collection of data or analysis that provides a misleading picture is high.
As Planning and BI specialists, we therefore need to ensure we remain focussed on the questions that need to be answered and apply our knowledge of the university environment to the way we prepare, present and interpret data. It’s important that we regularly look to new sources of data and find ways to speed up and automate the dissemination of data and analysis, but the challenge is to do this in a way that maintains data quality and supports accurate interpretation.
5. Complete this statement: In my role, I can’t operate effectively without…
A team of creative problem solvers with strong analytical and technical skills who can see the bigger picture and apply their knowledge to new issues.
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