Ready, Set, Dashboards!
Speaker: Duane Currie and Kris Strong
Abstract:
Acadia University struggles with providing senior administrators the data access that they need to make strategic decisions. Data initiatives and changes to recording practices were tackled by departments in isolation, and often in an ad-hoc manner, leading to inconsistency between reports and a resulting confusion for those trying to interpret what those reports are telling them. In 2025, this was addressed with the creation of a Data, Reporting and Integrations team within Technology Services.
In this session, we’ll talk about our dashboard project in which we quickly mobilized to build dashboards that are automated, centralized, expandable. We use Microsoft tools that we already had licensed, and have developed processes to implement them in a coordinated and prioritized way with input from senior leadership and subject matter experts to address specific institutional needs.
We’ll examine what we’ve done from both technical and process perspectives and share lessons that we’ve learned along the way. Our dashboards remain a work in progress and we will share where we are in the journey along with a review of lessons learned.
Speaker Bio:
Duane Currie started at Acadia in 1997 and has held a variety of roles in institutional research, management of technology for teaching and research environments, finance, and enterprise system administration. He has also been teaching courses for the Jodrey School of Computer Science since September 2000.
Kris Strong graduated from the School of Business at Acadia University in 2005. He held various IT administration and business positions before returning to Acadia in 2023 as a HR Analyst. He has developed several Power BI dashboards covering areas of Human Resources, Student Admissions, and Faculty Complement used by the Senior Leadership Team to support institutional planning and decision-making.