Building a Data-Informed Future 

The Office of Institutional Research and Effectiveness has officially entered a new era. Rebranded as the Office of Institutional Data and Analytics (IDA), the team has formally transitioned under the UDIT umbrella. This strategic realignment reflects a broader shift toward a more collaborative and service-oriented approach to Institutional Data & Analytics. IDA is evolving into an agile, campus-wide resource where data and analytics are a service. By collaborating directly with deans, vice presidents, and budget officers across all departments, the team is adopting a proactive approach to help leaders co-author university strategy.

Connecting Data, Technology, and Strategy

For Rich Reeves and his team, the core mission is to transition the university from a purely retrospective “bank statement” model of reporting to a dynamic analytical framework built for proactive insight. While a bank statement provides a historical list of past financial transactions, modern campus analytics must offer immediate context, health metrics, and predictive, actionable tools. Shifting to this forward-looking methodology allows campus leaders to anticipate institutional needs rather than simply analyzing historical outcomes.

Achieving this predictive future, however, relies entirely on underlying data quality across all administrative levels. Just as digital budgeting apps cannot track physical cash spending, our campus analytics tools cannot measure unrecorded or inconsistent business processes. True modernization requires identifying these gaps across campus and cleaning up foundational workflows at the root to ensure university records can drive meaningful organizational decisions.

To build a high-speed data thoroughfare across campus, individual departments must also make structural concessions. Reeves uses the metaphor of building a highway: creating efficient institutional data flows sometimes requires local processes to adapt to common standards. In this context, it means localized, legacy business processes must adapt to common institutional data standards so that different software systems can successfully talk to one another.

Hensights: Making Data More Accessible

IDA is developing Hensights, a centralized data portal designed to give university leaders easier access to the information they need. Rather than submitting repeated requests for commonly used reports and metrics, leaders will be able to access dashboards and analytics created based on user feedback directly through the portal.

The goal is to spend less time answering the same questions and more time helping the university address new ones. Once a dashboard or report is developed, it can continue to provide updated information without requiring additional requests, creating a growing library of shared institutional insights. 

This system transformation creates opportunities for broader conversations about balancing data stewardship, privacy requirements, and operational needs. Because every enterprise system has an assigned data steward, IDA historically functioned as an administrative middleman delivering access denials. Moving high-level data access and compliance conversations directly into transparent leadership forums allows stakeholders to collectively balance data protection regulations with the practical operational needs of campus managers.

Fostering a Campus Community of Practice

This new infrastructure builds directly upon recent technical milestones, including the successful sunsetting of legacy tools like Cognos in favor of modern, centralized platforms like Redshift and Tableau. In the past, a lack of unified standards meant multiple offices could enter critical meetings with conflicting student or faculty counts simply because they ran queries on different days or applied localized rules. By developing official, standardized templates in Tableau, IDA has anchored campus reporting to trusted, universal benchmarks.

Ultimately, software alone cannot transform institutional intelligence without a corresponding elevation in data literacy. When asked what he would solve if he could wave a magic wand, Reeves' ultimate wish is a universal campus “Data Dictionary” to eliminate metric ambiguity across divisions. Currently, a single word like “enrollment” can mean a dozen different things depending on context—whether it refers to undergraduate, graduate, residential Delawareans, or paying students. Fulfilling this dream of shared definitions and clear data timelines would prevent common missteps, such as mistakenly taking operational figures into high-level budget meetings.

This collaborative philosophy will anchor the upcoming redesign of the IDA website to serve as an active learning center. By housing standardized workbooks, data guides, and peer-reviewed code transparently, IDA is ensuring that UDIT doesn't just manage the university's technical infrastructure, but actively supports a data-informed culture that empowers the entire campus community.