Mercer Law School Chief Operating Officer Michael Dean presented a perspective on creating a culture of pervasive business intelligence in higher education on June 30 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His approach focuses on using simplified and self-service analytics along with new smartphone technology for sharing information to create a more instantaneously informed, collaborative decision-making process.

Dr. Dean’s presentation, titled “Pervasive Business Intelligence in the Academy: Moving Beyond Traditional BI with Simplified, Self-Service, and Shared Analytics,” was part of a multi-day conference presented by Rapid Insight, a company that specializes in predictive modeling and advanced data analysis.

“Dr. Dean gave a great presentation on using tools like Rapid Insight and Tableau to create a path to pervasive BI within an organization,” said Mike Laracy, founder and CEO of Rapid Insight Inc. “His approach to developing a culture of iterative, timely and collaborative decision-making was well received by the audience.”

In addition to his duties as COO for the Walter F. George School of Law, Dr. Dean serves as an associate dean for the Law School and a visiting assistant professor of educational leadership for Mercer’s Tift College of Education.

Dr. Dean’s presentation explained the traditional BI model and the new, evolving approach using self-service-oriented analytical tools, visualizations and smartphone distribution capabilities, such as custom organization information and dashboard apps, in order to provide key decision-makers and team members with instantaneous access to decision-support information.

“The presentation really resonated with me, as most of our challenges are business process issues, not IT issues,” said Scott Alessandro Director of the MIT Sloan Undergraduate Education Office. “Having readily accessible information and understanding how to frame questions based upon one’s data is essential to making smarter decisions. Business analytic skills are what we are teaching our students, so we need to adopt this learning. ”

“Analytics tools, whether used for predictive, prescriptive or descriptive purposes, are not in and of themselves a magic bullet,” said Dr. Dean. “The soundest and most agile decisions will emerge when an people are willing to collaborate while harnessing the power of an analytics process and then invest their collective energy toward becoming proficient with that process and toward continuously improving it. It’s what I like to call human-centered analytics.”