Speaker: Sue Harbour, Associate Dean & Executive Director, UC Berkeley
Please state your full name, title, organization, and the award name.
Sue Harbour: Hi, my name is Sue Harbour. I'm the Associate Dean and Executive Director of Berkeley Career Engagement. And we received the Technology Excellence Award.
Talk briefly about your program and what sparked you to develop it.
Sue Harbour: Our dashboard at Berkeley Career Engagement was sparked by the need for a modern dashboard to showcase our key performance indicators or KPIS. We utilize Google Workspace products including Sheets as well as Looker Studio in the summer of 2022 for a low cost efficient way to tell our story. The data visualization allows us to have meaningful conversations with our partners. We can share trends and outcomes and make better informed decisions with our team and stakeholders. Prior to '22 we simply recorded program attendance and appointments in an Excel document which was limited, static and a little clunky.
What were you trying to achieve? Did you achieve what you expected?
Sue Harbour: Our primary objectives were to create content rich and dynamic visualizations, gain insights and have meaningful conversations about our data, have the ability to share and collaborate trends and outcomes and make better informed decisions with our team members and stakeholders. This tool allows us to easily visualize usage stats, examine trends and gaps as well as discuss ways to develop relationships with campus partners in area where we see gaps. The ease of using this dashboard has been a game changer and when it comes to responding to requests from leadership about service delivery, maximizing staff service hours, making data-driven informed decisions and validating staff sentiment when they feel overwhelmed by the business of the academic cycle. Our dashboard essentially lets us work smarter and not harder.
Were there any surprises—any results you weren’t expecting?
Sue Harbour: The results were better than I expected. And what I really appreciate about the data is when you get more eyes on it, more ideas are generated to leverage the tool in order to visualize additional data points. This is how we grew our dashboard. It, it's evolved over time, but now it shows us trends in our outreach, particularly with our diverse and affinity populations.
How did you develop this program? What processes did you use?
Sue Harbour: The first step was to talk it through with the data analyst to discuss the possibilities with the tools we had being a Google Campus Workspace provided access to Looker Studio which is a Google Suite product. The next step was to clean our old data which dated back to 2007 and create a new Google Sheet and transfer all of those KPIS. In order to be pulled into Looker Studio. We spent the summer of 2022 cleaning the data of one on one appointments and then slowly added program, data, attendance, program information and then we later added affinity group ideas to further track our trends in progress.
From your perspective, what was the single most important outcome of this program?
Sue Harbour: In a relatively short period of time. Since developing this tool, we are easily able to use our KP I dashboard to examine the effectiveness of our efforts as well as identify gaps in service delivery. And in five years, we have increased our DEIB program offerings by 253%.
If someone wants to replicate your program, what do they need to know upfront (the first steps to take, potential pitfalls to watch for)?
Sue Harbour: Ideally, someone would want to have the desire to improve their vision for storytelling through data visualization. We know as accountability for our services increases, it's important to use data to support the work that we do using data visualization for storytelling is important in showcasing outcomes of our KPIS. Speak to a data analyst or someone at your Office of Institutional Research. If you do not have a data analyst on staff and work together to take your CRM data and visualize it to show your efforts and effectiveness.
