Providing effective practices and thought leadership that stimulates and sustains the growth of MCC as a national exemplar of evidence-based decision making.

Background

The Office of Institutional Research and Decision Support (IRDS) at Mott Community College transitioned its reporting line to the Office of the President in AY 2017-2018. This change situated the IRDS office as a more prominent member of the institution’s leadership hierarchy and allowed the IRDS staff to recast their role as an essential, go-to internal resource for institutional effectiveness, strategic planning, accreditation, and outcomes assessment in addition to performing core functions related to compliance and institutional research initiatives. In short, the IRDS office realignment supported a singular objective: to instill at Mott Community College a vibrant culture of data-informed decision making ** and establish MCC as a national model of evidence-based postsecondary education**.

Purpose of this Document

This document is the culmination of IRDS staff's self-evaluation and annual goal-setting process in AY 2023-2024. At a series of mini-retreats, we developed and refined a new statement of the IRDS office's mission, vision, and values. This document is intended to serve as a framework. It speaks to how we will conduct our work and emphasizes collaboration with staff, faculty, and student's across MCC's campus to support them in meeting their goals involving data and analytics. Thus, the IRDS mission and values provide a higher level of accountability—to ourselves and our stakeholders—that guide how we communicate about MCC's institutional effectiveness.

Mission Statement

The mission of the Office of Institutional Research and Decision Support (IRDS) is to provide a set of effective practices and thought leadership that stimulates and sustains the growth of Mott Community College as a national exemplar of evidence-based decision making.

The IRDS Vision

The Office of Institutional Research and Decision Support (IRDS) delivers equitable and sustainable information literacy practices that enable our stakeholders to tell the story of Mott Community College—its people, its programs, and its progress—through data.

Reflections on MCC’s Values and the Values of the IR/IE Profession

We affirm that the work of institutional research and decision support occurs within a larger paradigm of institutional effectiveness and continuous improvement, and that this work is not inherently objective nor ever completely finished.

We acknowledge MCC’s dual identity. It operates as an institution of higher learning— one that must conform to a specific regulatory and academic framework. It also functions as a cultural mainstay that extends beyond the higher education landscape of Mid-Michigan—one whose steadfast presence during the past one hundred years has shaped the lives of many thousands of people within the communities of Flint, Genesee County, and beyond.

We embrace our mutual responsibility to serve as stewards of data, information, knowledge, and wisdom about MCC and to uphold our professional values with integrity as we strive to achieve our office’s mission and goals while living into our vision.

As employees of the Office of Institutional Research and Decision Support (IRDS), we value:

  1. Engaging in practices that encourage equity, inclusion, and the full participation of multiple voices in MCCt-sponsored and/or IRDS-facilitated research inquiry.
  2. Recognizing that humans, not data, make decisions and therefore decision making should be data-informed, not data-driven.
  3. Prioritizing students, especially their holistic learning, development, success, and wellbeing in the provision of the IRDS research agenda.
  4. Fostering information literacy and democratizing data among our constituents to enable a comprehensive, systematic, transparent, and shared understanding of MCC as an institution and community partner.
  5. Reserving adequate time for professional development, which recognizes that growth as individuals has a direct influence on the strength of our relationships with one another and with other colleagues throughout MCC’s community.
  6. Making space for unhurried discussion and open dialogue about MCC’s research agenda, which holds that the work of institutional effectiveness is inherently ongoing and that continuous improvement may occasionally mean eschewing a rapid solution in favor of a more rigorous, durable, vibrant, and sustainable set of practices.
  7. Driving toward an ethical and human-centered rendering of digital transformation both at MCC and within the IR/IE profession by remaining vigilant and open-minded during the advent of new technologies and methods for communicating about information.
  8. Maintaining a culture of commitment, civility, and compliance as we perform our duties as internal consultants to the campus community and respectfully serving as a model for the three Cs as we to seek to solidify practices, automate processes, interpret data, steward information literacy, and disseminate the most accurate, reliable, validated, and trustworthy data narratives about Mott Community College’s place in higher education.