There were a number of nascent student information systems in 2004 when I became academic CIO and none of them would work at West Point. The service academies place unique demands on their cadets/midshipman that commercial student information systems could not handle. As a result, one part of my organization was the Software Engineering Branch (SEB) build a custom student information system and offered innovative data reporting services to strategic leaders. They were the magical fairy in a jar (in the basement of Mahan Hall) who would sprinkle their fairy dust and create systems and actionable data.
A good example of their work was cadet in processing. Every year, slightly more than 1,000 new cadets show up at West Point and in one day, they have to in process at 17 different stations where they were issued everything from clothes to a computer, get a haircut, learn to march, and participate in a marching parade. It was an incredibly tight schedule and a bottleneck at any one station could destroy the daily schedule. We wrote the software to track, in real time, the size of the queue at every station and the processing rate. The three general officers (Superintendent, Dean, and Commandant) used the information to “march to the sound of the guns” or if you do not know the reference, to move to the place where they could have to most impact on the battle (or schedule).
The team was very agile and responsive to custom requests for software and data given the resources we had. My job was to get them additional resources and I did with the technology budget doubling while I was the academic CIO. This fueled more innovation from great leaders like Edie Irwin.
If you are progressing through this journey sequentially, the next chapter is My Dog Ate my Homework.