Counting on data

When I look back on being a kid at school, I remember feeling like I was just ‘hanging in there’. I was always trying to figure out what the teachers were talking about, and trying to keep up with the lessons.

Later, as a parent of school kids, I tried to stay on top of what they were learning, how they were coping, and all of the information that the schools sent and needed from us.

If I look at this from the perspective of the schools, the challenges are much bigger. How can teachers more effectively help kids learn at the right pace for their individual needs? How can they better manage the compliance requirements that are eating up valuable teacher time? How can communication with parents/guardians be more effective for everyone?

My colleague Mason Davies, a Partner in Digital Delta, KPMG Australia, is helping an Australian state education department with these issues. He’s working with them to implement a digital transformation focused on data and analytics, so that the school system can offer more personalised learning, streamlined administration, and an improved experience for parents and guardians.

Data in education

While many schools have developed their own way of collecting and analysing data, Mason’s client needs a data-driven approach for the whole state that can offer a holistic view of each student, as well as bring data from all of the schools together into one place.

“One minute your student is using Google Classroom, the next minute Microsoft Teams… so it’s impossible to get that 360-degree view of a child’s performance across all platforms – also correlated across their health and wellbeing and the things that they may be going through,” Mason tells me.

The first step for Mason and his team has been implementing the right tools and processes for data capture. The next is integrating that data and setting up analytics capabilities to provide insights for decision making.

“If you can capture data about who did their homework last night, which child found a particular math problem difficult, which child learns in a particular way... you can provide personalised learning, so each child in a class can learn in their own way, pace and style,” says Mason.

When this data is combined across schools, it will help to support the state’s approach to teaching. For example, he says that if they find 20,000 children have the exact same difficulty with the exact same challenge in mathematics, they can work out a better way to teach the problem and can see the impact in real time as well. This uses adaptive learning, an approach that alters the types of question, language and problem posed to children, in response to their real-time learning requirements.

In terms of administration, Mason tells me that some schools have over 200 forms and manual processes in use to capture data, which is obviously taking up time that could be better spent. He’s focused on using technology to connect the front, middle and back offices, using digitisation and automation which can then streamline administration and make it faster and more efficient to communicate with parents.

“It’s looking to improve the parent experience, both in terms of how they interact with the school, but also ensuring that they’re a partner in their child’s learning experience by giving them access to similar data that a teacher might access, so they can see whether a child’s doing well, whether they’re struggling or not, and what strategies are going to help,” says Mason.

Every business is a data business

Mason’s work in the education sector is a reminder that every business is a data business, from schools, to hospitals, to retailers, banks, insurance companies and more. It’s almost limitless what information organisations can routinely collect digitally about their customers – from website views to store visits, transaction details, and call centre interactions for example. There’s also public data – such as how many people are on a particular bus, or what the air quality is like in a particular suburb on a certain day. With all of this information, organisations can see where to make improvements to operations, innovations, market positioning, company culture, and of course the customer experience.

Mason says the step than many organisations have yet to take, is to go further and focus on behavioural rather than standard demographic segmentation or segmentation based on transactional data. Behavioural segmentation helps businesses to understand what drives individuals and what they respond to, and can help stop businesses from broadcasting information to customers that doesn’t interest them. This is an important factor in building trust, as if customers are willing to share their data with a business, they want it used considerately in return.

Connected behind the scenes

Mason is using KPMG’s Connected Enterprise approach with his clients, which is designed to help organisations build the right data and analytics strategy to understand their customers better and make informed decisions. If, when I was a kid, my teachers had more support from data and analytics to adapt my learning, or as a parent of school kids, if I’d had more targeted interaction with my kids’ schools, that could have really improved my experiences, and made life a lot easier for the teachers and staff at the same time.

How could data and analytics help you create better experiences for your teams and customers?