s1e4 Integrating Business Intelligence Into the Educational System - Shaun Taylor

Limitless BI - Business Intelligence Podcast

01:02 – Introducing today’s guest, Shaun Taylor
01:22 – Shaun’s background with business intelligence and technology
02:37 – Shifting into a second career in education
03:01 – The changes Shaun has seen in the CIO role throughout the years
04:23 – What business intelligence means to Shaun
05:33 – How new business intelligence technologies shape out decision-making
06:47 – How Shaun got involved in business intelligence
07:54 – The multiple challenges Shaun faced as CIO of the Tacoma Public Schools
09:50 – The data challenge
11:10 – The challenges that public school systems face
13:27 – The importance of metrics
15:32 – How long it took to extract business intelligence metrics from the public school system
17:18 – Developing business intelligence dashboards
20:26 – Key factors that drove the actions that led to such a dramatic increase in graduation rates
22:07 – How the outside community impacted the success of Shaun’s business intelligence dashboards
23:15 – How the community, school board, and faculty reacted to this data
25:16 – Shaun speaks to the ripple effect this dashboard has had on other school districts
26:31 – Next steps for the Tacoma School District
29:25 – Next steps for Shaun in his consulting business
31:47 – The challenge to change the education system itself

EPISODE QUOTES

“And when I retired from the navy that’s when I tried to decide how to best leverage what I understood about information and how to help kids.” (02:27)

“What is the definition of success? That became a pretty challenging topic amongst the school board, the leadership of the district and also the community, because everyone had their own perceptions as to what success is.” (12:24)

“By the way, in education, ‘business intelligence’ is not a term they like to use because they think they’re different from business.” (14:50)

“Each two to three years, we added more benchmarks to see what else maybe we can do to influence better results for the kids. By the time we were done, just last year, our graduation rate is up eighty-seven percent from fifty-five percent.” (18:45)

“Education is a human intensive industry.” (21:01)

“Ya gotta have leadership buy-in and ya have to have leadership credibility to be able to pull something off like this.” (25:59)

“We need to hold school districts, administrators, and teachers accountable for what’s happening in schools.” (32:26)

LINKS MENTIONED

Limitless BI Website

Shaun’s LinkedIn