 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Pentaho World 2017. Brought to you by Hitachi Ventura. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Pentaho World. Brought to you by Hitachi Ventura. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Dave Vellante. We're joined by Brendan Aldrich. He is the Chief Data Officer at Ivy Tech, which is Indiana's community college system. Thanks so much for joining us, Brendan. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. And congratulations, because I know that you've just won the Pentaho Excellence Award for the Social Impact Category. At Ivy Tech, you are using the power of data to combat one of the toughest problems in education, higher education dropout rates. So tell us a little bit about what you're doing and how you're using data. Certainly. Well, Ivy Tech has been really one of the more innovative players in the higher education space when it comes to how we're utilizing data. Both from the work that the data engineering and our Chief Technology Officer has done, the work we're doing now from my area to make that data very useful and very usable for the organization. And we're tackling it on multiple fronts. We're using data in order to help more quickly identify students that have already completed the requirements to graduate or if they are close to or have already potentially completed the requirements to graduate on another major other than their declared major and starting those conversations with the students. And then what about the dropout too? So you're obviously also looking at students who are at risk. We've been engaged in a project called Project Early Success where we work in the first two weeks of a 16 week term to identify which students we believe are at risk for failure. And then we spend the next two weeks, weeks three and four of the term, coordinating hundreds of faculty, staff and administrators to reach out and try to talk to those students and see if we can move them back on track. The first term that we did that we saw a great success with. We by midterm were showing a 3.3 percentage point drop in our number of Ds and Fs being reported for an organization our size that meant over 3,000 students, more students who were passing their courses at midterm as compared to failing them compared to the year before. Scope of the organization, students size. Ivy Tech, we are Indiana Statewide Community college system, so we have 19 campuses, almost 9,000 employees and we educate around 160,000 students per year. Wow, so we're just getting back to that college dropout. So professors are putting in the data about who's going to class, who's not going to class, grades that they're getting and then that's all being fed in and you're finding out who the at-risk people are and it's really just reaching out to them and it's saying, hey, what's going on? Absolutely, and in fact, a lot of the work was done with our engineering team to actually identify data that related to the behaviors of the students. So it's not just their attendance, it's not just previous performance in similar classes but it's really finding those data elements that relate to behaviors of the students that we believe are going to put them on a less successful track. Brent, I wonder if we could talk about the role of the Chief Data Officer. When we talk to CDOs in for-profit organizations, they always say we start with an understanding of how data can help with our monetization strategies. Now, let's translate that for community college. Is that a reasonable starting point if I frame it as how data adds value to the organization? Is that where you started and take us through sort of the journey of your role? Absolutely, well, first of all, Chief Data Officers in higher education are still fairly rare. At the time that Ivy Tech hired me in December of 2015, I was only the ninth Chief Data Officer working at any college or university in the country and the first that had been appointed at a two-year college. So whereas a public institution like ours is not necessarily as driven by profitability, student success is something that's very high on our priority list and being sure that we were able to make data very available to everyone within the organization that was working with our students. So that they could use that data to more directly target the areas that they could help the student best. Now, there can be profitability components. As a public institution, we do receive funds from the state of performance funding for students who successfully graduate. In some ways, we've been able to use data to help our registrars identify those students more quickly, which certainly gives us a lot of opportunity not only to help the students on their own educational goals and careers, but to be able to increase the amount of performance funding that Ivy Tech receives from the state each year as well. So you've brought it to the other point, CDOs tell us is data access, making that data accessible. And then there's a trust component too. It's got to be reliable and it's hard with all this data and all this data growth. How are you addressing those challenges? One of the things that's really unique about how we're approaching data at Ivy Tech is this idea of a data democracy. It's more than self-service business intelligence or self-service analytics because instead of just providing access, we wanted to make sure that once our employees had access, that the data was intuitive, that it was relevant to their responsibilities, that it was interactive so that as their needs and challenges and questions evolve, they could continue to use data to answer those questions without having to go back to a central IT team or a central research team. So the data democracy is a really unique aspect of ours that was important to us. And I think at the moment we have about 4,000 of our employees trained and running on our platform today. So everybody wants to be data-driven these days. Your job is to actually affect that data-driven initiative. Culturally, people say they're data-driven, but they don't necessarily act that way. They still act on gut feel and this is the way we've always done it. How have you been able to affect the cultural transformation? Well it's important to remember that if you can make the right data available to the people who are ready to use it, that's a transformational opportunity. For us, before we began on this project, less than 2% of our employee base actually had the ability to create a report. Everyone else had to make requests, wait for data to be made available. It could take time and maybe that data wasn't available by the time they actually needed it. So if you think about that, moving from a place where less than 2% of our employees had access to data to a point where we're approaching 50% of our employees now having really good access to data, we didn't want just a few silver bullets. We feel that every one of our employees has the potential if they had the right data available to test their ideas with data and come up with brand new innovative ideas so we could have thousands of silver bullets coming to rise throughout our organization. So give us some examples. I mean we've talked a little bit about how the data is transforming the student experience and student success rates, but what are some of your grand ideas about how faculty and how employees can use data to test ideas and make their lives easier and make Ivy Tech more successful? Oh absolutely, well and even if you think about project early success and the idea that we were helping to identify students that we believe may be struggling behaviorally in being successful in their courses. Now if you can take that as an attribute and you can surface it through our system to the employees that are using it, which includes our faculty. Our faculty members now have the ability to see very quickly which of their students may be struggling and have the chance to intervene with those students as well on a regular basis. So it's not just one phone call in the beginning of the term, it's not just project early success but now what we're talking about as project student success. How do we continue to use that kind of information to engage the student over the entire course of the term to ensure that we're not just changing their trajectory a little bit in the beginning but that we're following that journey with them over the course of their educational goal. Can you talk about the regime in your organization, the reporting structure, to whom do you report? Is there a CIO? There is. What's the relationship there? There is a CIO who I report to, the chief technology officer and I both report to the CIO. And we had a recent change in our leadership within the organization as well. Back a year ago this last July, we have a new president of the statewide organization, Dr. Sue Ellsberman, who was formerly our Lieutenant Governor for the state of Indiana. So that's interesting that you report to the CIO. Most chief data officers, we find, I wonder if we could comment, don't report into the CIO, there's sort of a parallel organization for a variety of reasons. People generally believe that while it maybe one day was the CIO's job, it's sort of the CIO's job morphed into kind of keeping the lights on and the infrastructure going. But what do you see amongst your colleagues with that regard? You know what's important for me and I think if you look at every organization across the country, there's this data knowledge gap. This idea that you've got your IT and engineering staff that knows everything there is about how to build, support, augment and decommission these systems. But generally have not been as involved in what the data means inside those systems or what decisions are being made off that data. On the other half of that gap, you've got all of the rest of your organization, the people that are using data to know what it means and who are making decisions from it. But generally don't know enough about how to think about structuring that data so that they could get the engineering teams to build them new tools. This is really the place where a chief data officer in my mind comes to sit because my goal is to build those bridges between the organization so that we can help engineering learn more about what we're doing as an organization with data and then use that information to build tools that will drive the rest of the organization closer to those goals through data. Now you're not a bank so you got imagining a pretty small team. Maybe you could talk about that and how you manage with such a small team. You know, it's interesting, most organizations when you think about a build versus buy scenario, you think about, well, I don't have a lot of people, I don't have a lot of bandwidths, maybe we need to buy. Now, Ivy Tech went through that process and every one of the RFPs that came back were too expensive, we couldn't afford to do it. So as a team we had to sit down and think about how do we really rethink the way that we approach this in order to still accomplish what we need out of data and out of our data warehouse and analytic systems. Part of what I'll be speaking at the conference today is some of those entrenched data practices that we had to overcome or rethink and rewrite in order to get to where we are today. Well, Brendan, it's been so much fun having you on theCUBE, thanks so much. Well, thank you, I appreciate it. I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante, you are watching theCUBE, we will have more from Pentaho World in just a little bit.