Key points:
- Student success governance enables outcomes to move
- Challenges, changes, and the road ahead: The state of data in higher education
- How higher ed can get the most out of advanced analytics
- For more on data and student success, visit eCN’s IT Leadership hub
Student success platforms have become fixtures in higher education. Tools such as Navigate, Starfish, Civitas, and CRM Advise promise smarter interventions, streamlined advising, and coordinated care.
Institutions invest heavily in licenses, staffing, and training with the hope that these systems will help more students persist and graduate. Yet many campuses see uneven results. The gap is often not technical performance; it is the absence of governance to align people, process, and technology.
The problem is not the tech
When a platform or large student success initiative is launched without governance, drift follows. Training is inconsistent, data entry varies by user, and features go underused or misused. One office logs alerts while another does not, one advisor schedules through the platform while another keeps using email and Calendly. Over time the system becomes a patchwork of workarounds that still functions but never becomes transformative infrastructure. Technology does not create student success on its own–people do, and people need structure to act in concert. That’s what governance provides.
Governance is the leadership framework that sets direction, assigns ownership, and ensures accountability. It names a strategic owner for the platform and a day-to-day product owner who can make decisions quickly. It defines data stewardship to ensure required fields, codesets, and privacy rules are consistent. It creates a cadence for decisions, a process for changes, and a way to measure results. Most importantly, it connects the platform to institutional goals so that usage standards are not arbitrary rules, but enablers of student care.
Governance asks essential questions
- Who owns the system strategically?
- Who manages it operationally?
- How will data be maintained and protected?
- What expectations will guide usage, training, and accountability?
- What does success look like, and how will we know we are achieving it?
Core roles to name and empower
- Executive sponsor, product owner, and data steward
- Functional leads from advising, faculty, registrar, IR, IT, financial aid, student affairs, and other units that have a stake in the outcomes
- Student voice through a representative or advisory panel
- A small working group that meets weekly and a steering group that meets monthly
Essential artifacts to publish
- One-page charter with scope, goals, and decision rights
- RACI for requests, releases, and communications
- Data dictionary and required-fields standard
- Training and certification plan for key roles
- KPI dashboard that is reviewed on a fixed cadence
Metrics that matter
Student success governance enables outcomes to move. Select a short list, define them precisely, and report consistently. Useful starting points may include faculty, staff, and student utilization, alert closure rate within seven days, percentage of appointments scheduled in the platform, no-show rates, time to outreach after an early alert, percentage of courses planned before registration, and first-term or year-to-year retention. Keep the set small enough that leaders and advisors can remember it and act on it. Go deeper by disaggregating by student groups to identify equity impacts.
Common pitfalls and how to fix them
Governance sets direction, but execution may falter in predictable places. Here are some common student success platform pitfalls and the remedy for each.
| Pitfall | Fix |
| Tool sprawl: Multiple scheduling or note-taking tools create noise. | Designate one official workflow and sunset the rest with dates and support. |
| Inconsistent training: New staff learn by osmosis. | Require role-based certification and refresher checkpoints tied to permissions. |
| Customizations without owners: Fields multiply and no one curates them. | Route new fields and automations through the data steward or other platform leader with an approval rubric. |
| Orphaned alerts and stale cases: Students fall through the cracks. | Publish service-level targets and route exceptions to supervisors weekly. |
| No sunset policy: Pilots linger and confuse users. | Add end dates to every pilot and a short rubric for renew or retire decisions. |
Strong governance can turn a platform into infrastructure. Faculty, academic advisors, and student affairs staff work in sync rather than in silos. Data becomes a decision aid rather than a bureaucratic compliance task. Students receive timely outreach, clearer next steps, and fewer handoffs. The institution can adapt quickly because change flows through a transparent process rather than one-off favors or shadow IT. And good governance ensures that technology and practice continue to evolve as needs and strategies change.
Mike Dial is Senior Program Manager for Advising Technology Innovation and Assessment at the University of South Carolina, where he leads campus-wide advising technology strategy and governance. He partners across advising, student services, and IT to streamline workflows and connect data to decisions for USC’s 11 colleges and schools.
A practitioner-scholar, Dial is the author and editor of two books on student success. He co-edited Academic Advising Administration: Essential Knowledge & Skills for the 21st Century, 2nd Edition, and edited Academic Recovery: Supporting Students on Academic Probation, a volume published by the National Resource Center for The First-Year Experience and Students in Transition. His writing also appears in refereed journals and scholarly, practitioner-focused newsletters, where he has explored digital literacy, organizational philosophy for advising, and academic recovery models.
His national presentations include sessions at the Annual Conference on The First-Year Experience, NACADA, and NASPA, along with pre-conference workshops on designing early alert and intervention programs. Dial’s work has been recognized with a NACADA Certificate of Merit for Outstanding Advising Programs. He contributes to the field through service on editorial and advisory boards, including Building Bridges for Student Success, E-Source for Student Transitions, and the NACADA Publications Advisory Board.
Across roles, Dial’s focus is consistent: make complex systems simple for students and staff, align people and process with purpose, and ensure the right person reaches the right student at the right time.
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