Why Our Data Focus Is Action, Not Analytics

There is one piece of information users should keep in mind with this new Insights 2.0 release.

Insights without action is worthless.

After a lot of internal work, we realized that if a dashboard doesn’t make everyone’s workload easier, or better support schools, there’s no point in creating it. School leaders are way too busy for charts and reports that don’t do anything to help them or their school. Our main question when creating the 2.0 release of Insights by CSP has been ‘Does this help the people who keep schools running do their jobs better?’

Here’s an example of what we learned during an internal work session here at CSP: Insights offers a feature where you can report the number of print copies generated by each grade level team. At first glance, it sounds like a great insight to have access to, as there is potential to track your highest users. We quickly realized that less than a tenth of a percent of the total expense budget at some of our schools was allocated to the cost of the actual copies generated by teachers. School leaders have far too many things to do that are a higher priority than analyzing a copier report and then taking action. It’s not that tracking your copier expenses isn’t important, but it’s far less of a priority compared to everything else school administrators do to keep a school running and thriving. 

The main takeaway from this: If it doesn’t save you time, help you make a smarter decision, or get a better result for students, then it’s just noise.

That’s why the Insights 2.0 release becomes as a fresh of breath air. We’re not focusing on piling on data for you to look at, all of the information included will be helpful to you. Every update we made, we asked the same question: does this help schools take action? When the answer was "yes", we added that feature to our to-do list.

We believe the best results come when data meets human connection. Our Finance and SIS teams are dedicated to helping you navigate the insights within your dashboards, providing the hands-on support you need to leverage that data with confidence. We look forward to supporting our clients as they explore the new version!