Minnesota State Colleges and Universities

Problems Solved: Losing Competitive Position, Poor Performance of Underserved Learners		Strategic Focus: Leading/Navigating Change, Action Analytics™, Developing Organizational Capacity, Changing Organizational Culture, Serving the Underserved
Project Team: Donald Norris, Joan Leonard, Phil Taylor

The Minnesota State Colleges and Universities (MnSCU) consist of 32 institutions serving over 300,000 learners.  MnSCU is leveraging its analytical resources and relationships by developing a loosely-coupled, “action analytics utility.”  This capability will shape interventions based on a repository of contextualized “actions that work” to improve the performance of underserved learners across P-16 and employment settings.  These capabilities will be utilized to develop the organizational capacity of all of its public/private partners and to make available information resources to all stakeholders of public and private higher education.

 In addition, this venture will leverage MnSCU’s statewide portfolio initiative, winner of an award from the National Governors Association, that is reaching into K-12, postsecondary education, employers, and citizens at large.  MnSCU is proposing to leverage its portfolio, executive dashboards and analytics, and “serving the underserved” initiatives to create this action analytics utility, drawing data from and sharing insights with P-16, employers, state workforce organizations, the community at large, and policy makers. MnSCU’s internal action analytics capabilities will be used as a model to raise capacity across all work and learning enterprises in the State of Minnesota.

Strategic Initiatives is working with MnSCU to develop the vision and plan for the action analytics environment.  In addition, we are helping raise funding for the initiative.  Most importantly, Strategic Initiatives is participating in the three key tasks for this initiative: 1) developing the action analytics capability, 2)  building MnSCU’s action analytics capacity so it can share world-class capabilities, and 3) shaping MnSCU’s efforts to leverage relationships with K-12 schools,  postsecondary institutions, employers, and workforce organization partners.  This will enable MnSCU to demonstrate and proliferate action analytics across all work and learning enterprises.