AIRE Strategies 2024

Jayhawks Rising Objectives: Increase Workplace Satisfaction, Improve Health and Wellness, Improve Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging

Strategies:

• Incorporate job description review into annual evaluation process to ensure documented clarity of roles, responsibilities, and expectations. 

• Review compensation to market annually and implement salary modifications when appropriate (once implemented, AIRE will follow KULC process to ensure market competitive wages). 

• Create opportunities to build community across teams in AIRE to encourage internal knowledge sharing, professional development, and increased sense of belonging. 

• Continue to invest in the work of a dedicated communication professional to design and execute an internal communication strategy. 

• Encourage AIRE employees to actively participate in local and national professional organizations, providing leadership when appropriate, and engaging in professional development opportunities often. 

• Include opportunity to sponsor employees working to establish their permanent residency in all new exempt position advertisements. 

• Provide flexible work arrangements to allow all employees to contribute and provide impact to KU while fulfilling personal obligations. 

Jayhawks Rising Objectives: Ensure Stewardship of Institution

Strategies:

• Ensure strategic alignment by facilitating a process to design and execute a dynamic institutional strategic plan (Jayhawks Rising) and all supporting processes and communications. 

• Establish annual process to review, enhance, and produce Strategic Alignment Briefing Books to ensure consistent source of institutional data for strategic conversations, planning, and decision making. 

• Organize and facilitate an institutional survey coordinating committee to ensure effective administration of all institutional surveys, with the goal to reduce survey redundancy and increase response rates. 

• Develop, socialize, and implement a new campus constituent survey process. 

• Monitor and provide feedback to campus on all Campus Constituent Survey recommendations three times each year. 

Jayhawks Rising Objectives: Ensure Stewardship of Institution

Strategies:

• Design an effective data governance structure and begin implementation through clear goals and priorities. 

• Coordinate with Procurement and IT to execute an institutional data asset inventory to have baseline understanding of where institutional data is being collected and where it currently resides. 

• Reduce complexity of data flows at KU by instituting process to require all new data integrations to flow from the institutional data warehouse, while simultaneously building an increasingly robust data warehouse. 

Jayhawks Rising Objectives: Ensure Stewardship of Institution

Strategies: 

• Launch AIRE Open Labs to create opportunities for campus data users to learn and troubleshoot data questions. 

• Identify where training for various campus constituent groups is occurring on campus and how training on data tools and resources can be effectively incorporated into training calendars. 

• Design and execute a campus communications plan to increase education and awareness of AIRE's tools and resources. 

Jayhawks Rising Objectives: Ensure Stewardship of Institution

Strategies:

• Create a unit-level 5-year financial plan, incorporating previously allocated central commitments and expected software escalation fees. 

• Partner with procurement to review software licenses managed by AIRE and negotiate contracts when appropriate. 

• Facilitate campus-wide business intelligence tool evaluation to identify preferred tool(s). 

• Review resources currently available in business intelligence tools (Visual Analytics and OAC) and consider what is and is not in congruence with our institutional strategic data needs and deprecate dashboards when appropriate. 

• Continue to ensure all mandated reporting is executed accurately and on time, including submissions to IPEDS, KBOR, NSF HERD, and various data exchanges through the AAU, etc. 

• Develop and maintain dashboards in support of key financial stewardship initiatives (i.e. Net Revenue, Pay in 30). 

Strategies:

• Enhance existing academic program review data packets to support the academic program review process. 

• Continue to invest in existing campus partnerships and explore new partnerships to ensure AIRE data tools and resources are effectively integrated into existing processes to support improvement in student success. 

• Continue to maintain and enhance comparative dashboards to assist with reflection on various student success metrics for KU and peer institutions, supporting the identification of best practices and the establishment of effective external networks. 

• Provide analytical insights utilizing AIRE supported tools and resources to aid campus discussions related to current and proposed academic programs. ​ 

• Continue to maintain and enhance point-in-time and longitudinal enrollment trend dashboards to support the strategic enrollment management efforts of the institution. 

Strategies:

• Continue to support the maintenance and enhancement of dashboards and completion of ad hoc analysis to ensure a data-informed foundation for conversations specific to instructor workload.  ​ 

• Continue to engage with the AAU data exchange in a new effort to establish a data exchange item that provides comparative row level data on instructor workload and instructional cost by discipline. 

• Finalize the design of a new faculty activity management platform in order to accurately and comprehensively capture faculty activity. 

Strategies:

• Continue to provide data and insight support to the chairs of the Faculty Compensation Advisory committee as they finalize a compensation analysis that will advance efforts to ensure market and merit-based wages for faculty, accompanied by a compensation philosophy that can be operationalized.   

• Ensure the development of effective reporting in the new Faculty Insight faculty activity management tool to inform effective faculty evaluative processes, and support faculty development. 

• Partner with the Office of Faculty Affairs to incorporate institutional data programming in new and existing chair and faculty development program offerings.   

• Support the new Director of Faculty Awards and Recognition in data needs and insights to support advancement of faculty awarding and recognition at KU. 

Strategies:

• Engage with campus partners to ensure the best use of available campus tools to advance publicly the scholarly impact of KU researchers. 

• Partner and provide data support to ensure the effective completion of an economic impact study in 2024. 

• Continue to support all requests for Qualtrics assistance needed for survey related projects of KU faculty, staff, and students.   

• Maintain and enhance internal AAU metric comparison dashboard, encourage use by appropriate campus leaders, and provide insights to inform institutional strategy.