Gray Associates, now Gray Decision Intelligence (Gray DI), was once a handful of strategy consultants with expertise in communications, computers, and cars who came to love working for colleges and universities. In our higher education strategy work, we were often asked to evaluate academic programs, which led us to develop databases on student demand, competition, jobs, and program financials for 1,500 academic programs in 80,000 census tracts across the US.
For the team at Gray DI, providing the data and software needed to inform higher-education decisions is now a calling. Colleges and universities need better information to survive and thrive in an increasingly challenging market.
Our new name, Gray Decision Intelligence, reflects this calling. Gray DI will identify the key decisions that college leaders make and provide the best available information to enable better, faster decisions. We will summarize the data in carefully designed decision dashboards. These dashboards will create a sound taxonomy – and shared vocabulary – for difficult choices; they will also provide the specific information and predictive models required to make each decision.
Gray Decision Intelligence will continue to use advanced technologies, especially artificial intelligence, to capture, clean, organize, and communicate information. For example, using AI, we capture and analyze labor data; we are developing the ability to create text reports that summarize our data. We are developing predictive analytics so colleges can envision the future consequences of their decisions. Our people will continue to evaluate our AI, models, and data for accuracy, align diverse data into coherent decision dashboards, and design and facilitate effective, timely, participative decision-making processes.
