3. What do you anticipate the needs of your clients to be in the age of ‘disruption’ in tertiary education? E.g. What are your thoughts around data and analytics for the future?

At this year’s AAIR Forum, the potential impact of the Australian Universities Accord on tertiary education was a hot topic. It was very interesting to hear the level of reliance on quality data from multiple institutions as a tool to which they will try to navigate this disruption. Many presentations focused on the need to increase the drive to data-driven decision-making when it comes to ensuring that the right decisions are made to ensure success at an institutional level. Drawing from my experience across various industries undergoing similar disruptions, I firmly believe that there’s an unprecedented need to ensure that the investments made in data and analytics are not just made but utilised effectively. We at Altis see this next phase as the period of ‘data literacy’ within higher education. This means that investments must be made into ensuring your various departments and teams are competent with discovering insights through data, and in conjunction with this, your systems are increasingly ‘user-friendly’ to accommodate this. If your institution’s data platform is not set up and ready for this influx of insight-hungry business users, then it is time to get some help getting ready for this.

4. What has Altis Consulting learned from its involvement with the higher education sector in Australia and New Zealand?

We at Altis have played a major role in building and developing flexible and stable data platforms for many institutions across Australia and New Zealand, and this has been a rich learning experience! There is not enough time to explain all that we’ve learned along the way, but I can certainly share a few key takeaways.

I’d have to start by saying that although every institution is of course unique, when it comes to building sustainable data platforms and processes, there are universal truths that must be applied to ensure success. I alluded to one of these earlier when I spoke of data literacy, but there is also data visualisation best practice and data governance that must be included in this. These 3 pillars, if set up and maintained correctly, can set the foundations for a successful platform that will thrive in a world that is often changing faster than we can budget for or throw resources at.

One other learning I will make note of is that through our work in this industry and other similar industries, we have seen great success when the traditional divide between IT and ‘the business’ is removed, and the two sides work closer together. As your institution becomes more and more data literate, the interest from the business teams to have more control over their insight generation through data will grow. All too often we have seen business departments implement their own shortcut solutions to get around their reliance on IT. If we can bridge that gap between business expectations and IT solutions and capabilities, then data platforms can be the home for data insights and solutions for the whole institution.