 How do you make a decision if you don't know what you know? Data helps you make decisions, whether you are a student or a faculty member trying to improve your course or an institution trying to be more efficient. Now people still have to make the decisions, but analytics, the data, the predictions help you do that better. Imagining the future of higher education often involves a world of technology, ubiquitous computing, flexible classrooms, audio-visual innovation, and more. But one of the most dramatic evolutions in higher education is happening right now, and it's called analytics. Analytics is being used in a variety of applications in higher education, from addressing student retention to evaluating teaching and learning tools to finding enterprise solutions. Analytics can help campus leaders make informed decisions. So it's important for IT leaders to continue to make the case for analytics. Frankly speaking, five years ago, or ten years ago, twelve years ago, we had the ability to throw money at problems. With the decline in resources and the scarcity of resources, we have to be very good at the top of our game and we've got to be better at having evidence to understand the problems we have because simply we don't have the ability to be less exacting in our solutions. I think the critical items to consider when you start an analytics program are there's essentially four. You want to make sure you have a long-term funding commitment. It's critical to make sure that you're going to be able to continue whatever programs that you put into place. You want to make sure you're getting your executive leadership buy-in. There's no reason to pursue a program if nobody's going to actually pay attention to the results that will be presented at the end. Once you have that buy-in, you want to find out what the priority issues are for the various stakeholders. The critical piece is the usability, the ease of access. How will you be able to transition that information back into valuable, applied usage information that they can bring back into the classroom, bring back into their college, or just make the entire institution a better institution because they're making better decisions using the analytical responses that they've found. Don't try to do everything at once. Have some limited goals, pick an important problem, and try to make some real progress with that problem. Try to really have some short-term benefits coming out of the analytics program, and that's going to then lead to what should be a long-term successful program as well. Don't go out and buy a software, and don't start collecting data. Really understand your problem, really understand the domain area you're working in, and if you're trying to collect some data to affect some planning or change, really have your outcomes well-defined. And then once you have that, then you can go to what kind of data is appropriate and helpful, and then you can talk about tools if they're necessary. While some argue that analytics can raise questions around the commodification of the student experience, it remains the most affordable, most scalable, and lowest-risk path to performance improvement. Analytics is a tool that can penetrate the fog that has settled over some aspects of higher education. It can empower leaders to move forward with confidence, can provide proven outcomes, and can help students overcome obstacles to success. But analytics is only a tool. It must be combined with the intelligence of our leaders and our community. I think the power of learning analytics is it gives the CIOs, it gives IT a reason to be at the table. It allows them to do that. So the question is, are we asking the right questions?