Associate Vice Provost for Academic Decision Support

The Associate Vice Provost for Academic Decision Support leads the university’s efforts to provide valid and reliable management data to inform institutional strategic planning, continuous improvement processes, performance based resource allocation, and external accountability. This is accomplished through advocacy for a culture of data informed decision making and continuous improvement throughout the institution and the effective leadership of the Academic Decision Support function within the Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost.

The Associate Vice Provost is an integral member of the Provost leadership team. In the past two years, Virginia Tech has undertaken a major change in its resource allocation model for academic programs, moving from an incremental budget to a performance budget. Successful implementation of this model is underway using new approaches to institutional data management and reporting. The Associate Vice Provost, along with data stewards and analytics groups and specialist across campus, will lead the way in transformation of the institutional data management model from a traditional warehouse schema with organizationally siloed access to a data lake approach with appropriate role-based access to connect management data for users across the organization. The Associate Vice Provost will work closely with the office of the Chief Information Office (CIO) to expand upon the success of the approaches piloted in the Office of Academic Decision Support more broadly within the institution.

The Associate Provost leads the Office of Academic Decision Support. This office is composed of a growing team of data analytics, institutional research, and assessment professionals, co-located and working collaboratively to analyze institutional data, support institution assessment efforts, and build new tools for enhancing broader access and understanding of institutional data. This team provides well-defined, reliable quantitative data sources on inputs, outputs, outcomes and ratios for managers throughout the institution. The office documents and supports the institution’s continuous improvement practices and performs other assessments that validate that our quantitative metrics are truly representative of intended academic outcomes and objectives. The Associate Vice Provost will continue to build, direct, enable, and retain this high performing team to accomplish these goals.

The Associate Vice Provost works directly with Vice Presidents, Deans, and other senior leaders of the institution to identify and define key strategic outcomes and their supporting inputs and outputs. The Office of Academic Decision Support then operationalizes these definitions into data elements drawn from institutional systems of record and ultimately from an institutional data lake repository. The office of Academic Decision Support summarizes and visualizes this data in an online university decision support tool accessible to managers across the institution. This system includes student, faculty and financial data and is the supporting system for the university’s performance budget model and its tracking of organizational progress toward strategic plan goals.

A Masters degree in statistics, business information technology, systems engineering, quantitative social science, or a related area.

Professional experience in a higher education setting in areas such as data analysis business intelligence, data mining, decision support, and academic and administrative assessment.

Demonstrated experience in building and leading a team of developers and analysis in the creation of reports and reporting tools for broad use across the institution.

Demonstrated success in analytical, problem-solving, project planning and implementation, and consultation.

Demonstrated excellence in communication skills.

Demonstrated commitment to the value of data and assessment as methods to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of complex organizations.

Considerable professional experience in a higher education related setting in areas such as data analysis, business intelligence, data mining, decision support, or a related field.

Significant demonstrated experience leading a team of professionals working in the development of data visualization tools.

Demonstrated experience leading a team of professionals in the development of and use of assessment models and processes.

Demonstrated expertise in current principles and procedures of higher education strategic planning, decision support, and assessment.

Demonstrated experience working with executive leadership to solicit institutional questions and information needs and developing creative and data informed solutions addressing those questions and needs.

Demonstrated success in building collaborative relationships with diverse colleagues in a large and distributed organization.