Rana Glasgal (BS, ORIE ’87, MEng, ORIE ’92) is the Associate Vice-Provost for Institutional Research and Decision Support at Stanford University. Her job has two major components: performing Institutional Research (IR) functions and maintaining a Decision Support data warehouse. The two components dovetail together, since any university’s IR function relies heavily upon a thorough and accurate data warehouse.

The first component of the job, Institutional Research (IR), is the study of the university itself, with the goal of adding value to decision making. Specifically, IR involves gathering statistics about students, faculty, courses, finances, and research, as well as conducting complex studies of student life, faculty life, and historical trends and forecasting. An important part of IR is comparing the university to other universities that are similarly sized and structured. For example, Stanford typically compares itself to Ivy League universities. IR is like an internal “consulting” job in that people from around the university ask for IR services to provide reports, administer surveys, and make recommendations.

The second aspect of her job, Decision Support, involves making reporting data available to managers around the university. The Decision Support function encompasses the management and development of user-friendly data access tools, so a decision-maker or manager does not have to know how relational databases work, or how to write a query or program. Thus, the job involves taking complex data structures and making them simple and easy to access. It is also necessary to understand the users of the data and anticipate their needs, so new collections of data can be built to provide useful information in a timely manner.

Ms. Glasgal’s background in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering at Cornell University was excellent preparation for both aspects of her job. The OR side contributed knowledge of statistics and forecasting, and the required CS courses taught her about programming, data structures, and general computing. Had CIS existed at the time, many of the courses she took as an undergrad and graduate student would likely have come under the CIS umbrella.

Prior to working at Stanford, Ms. Glasgal was a consultant with Decision Focus Incorporated (DFI) in Mountain View, California. DFI employed management science techniques such as optimization, statistics, and forecasting to help make decisions for clients in the utility, transportation, and hospitality businesses. This job was another example of how operations research skills were combined with computing skills to produce ongoing solutions for clients.