The wheel of fortune

We have two powerful concepts that, without each other, diminish the total value proposition for any improvement. How many times do I see clever visualisations, widgets and dashboards over business stuff doing good things for decision makers, analysts, data miners but with the big question left unanswered …. “what do we do next?” Finding the insight does not necessarily mean action. And let’s be clear, an email is a pretty poor example of action. Yes, insights added to the tacit knowledge of knowledge workers = opportunity, but so often there is a critical breakdown at this juncture.

Real life scenario
Here’s a practical example of the wheel of fortune. You decide which is the better outcome.

Problem
Further education organisations need a way of identifying students who are starting to disengage. Students leaving courses lead to funding gaps, lower organisation performance and create resource utilisation issues.

Solution
Collect student profiles and activity data, build rules and triggers to monitor and identify those at risk, watch for patterns that indicate those at risk, create dashboards for Student Engagement Managers to monitor and act on.

What do we do next?
Shall we leave it there? Should the actions, case management and decisions for that floundering student be left undirected and disconnected?

Or should there be integrated processes to manage the risk such as triggering student engagement officers to case manage the students, facilitating events, notifications, etc?

Then should we add this to the pool of activity and knowledge and continue to monitor?

Then should we start to learn what is effective and adjust our processes to match?

Process insight process insight process insight process insight. The wheel of fortune.