What are the latest benefits of data analytics at your organization? Do you still need to intentionally highlight these to maintain or increase investment in this function?

Data Analytics function at George Brown College is decentralized – we have shared ownership model of this function by Strategic Planning & Institutional Analysis, ITS, Finance, HR, Registrar’s Office, Marketing and other departments. Each department performs the data analytics attributed to their core function. For example, my team prepares analysis of the financial data.

The importance of Data Analytics function is consistently highlighted at the College. We are currently engaged in the journey of renewing and modernizing our digital HR, Finance and Student Systems, so we already have a considerable multi-million investment in data analytics planned and penciled-in for the next 5 years.

I would say our latest benefit has been establishing our D&A team as the source of truth for various critical supply chain KPIs. Before we established this creditability. Each functional stakeholder was the source of truth for their own KPI in isolation. This lead to competing priorities and trade offs that weren’t immediately visible to all stakeholder. We are all at least now speaking a common language when we make decisions.

And yes, we continuously need to demonstrate value to encourage more investment. This is the part of the game we understand and tolerate, but do not love because the value to us seems obvious.

We are investing significantly to uplift our strategic workforce planning capability.  This is particularly significant now as we consider how to operationalise our long term strategies which must take many possible scenario into consideration.  To achieve this we realise we need to better-understand our current workforce and operating model strengths and weaknesses, and then have the tools and information available to help our leaders with scenario planning and modelling to support critical decisions on our future-state operating model and workforce capability requirements.  These same tools and methods will maintain their value as our scenario models and plans will always evolve and therefore our 'target' workforce model will change over time, even if our initial assumptions are very accurate.