What about MIS?

Would you throw out your MIS system if you could? Let me explain how I use it for the benefit of you and our customers.

Accountability is a buzz word in every work environment. How do we know we are achieving our mission? How can we show that we are giving the state and the university a good return on their investment in us?

We have struggled for more than a decade to determine how to best document what we do. We have settled on a variety of ways. First, we tell a lot of stories about your work. A good amount of the work we do cannot be reduced to numbers. For example, if you help a city with budget preparation or a county with a legal problem, we have not been able to determine the economic value of that assistance beyond how much it costs us to do it. So rather than reduce that type of work to numbers, we write anecdotal stories about your work and how it impacts the citizens we serve.

Second, we collect a lot of numbers! Your MIS data feed the IPS scorecard which feeds the UT scorecard. A system wide team is in the process of evaluating the scorecard data, but I don't anticipate it will change significantly. So, we do reduce a fair amount of the work we do to numbers. What was the economic impact of projects implemented? Were jobs created as a result? How many hours did participants spend in the classroom? Etc. Etc.

What else do we do with these data other than feed our scorecards? Every year each member of the board of trustees (who approves our budget and our salary plans) and the legislature (which allocates our appropriations) receives a personal statement of impact in the district he/she represents. We present the numbers and also a series of anecdotal stories. These are posted on our Internet site. Take a look at some samples if you've not seen them before.



We also use similar pieces in a variety of ways throughout the year to demonstrate the impact of the Institute for Public Service across the state. What you do matters. What you do is reported and what you do is appreciated by our stakeholders.

So, I'm not asking you to love your MIS systems. Maybe some of them can be improved and streamlined. But, I am asking you to feed them. The information is used in many, many ways and I want you to know that it is important.