Strategic Benchmark Dashboard

A strategic plan can declare that a university will be global and sustainable and still leave the follow-up question unanswerable: compared with other technology universities across Southeast Asia, where does it stand? Answering meant opening spreadsheets by hand. This prototype pulls the scattered indicators onto one screen.

What gets measured

The starting point is the pillars international ranking systems already use, plus two dimensions the plan declares for itself but does not yet track: international research collaboration and the sustainable development goals. Data comes from public rankings, annual reports, and a licensed bibliometric database.

The hard part is making numbers comparable

Raw totals mislead when institutions differ in size — a larger university always publishes more in absolute terms, so output has to be divided by academic staff before the comparison means anything.

Money is harder: the cost of living differs several-fold across these countries. Rather than quietly adjusting and letting readers assume the figures line up, the prototype labels them plainly as not adjusted for purchasing power.

Definitions diverge too. The clearest case is counting companies spun out of a university — some countries count only deep-tech ventures, others every student business. The fix: attach definition, source, and caveat to every number right where it appears.

What the screen does

What the prototype does is not rank who leads and who trails, but put what the plan declares as a focus beside what the results actually show.

And it genuinely remains a prototype: the purchasing-power adjustment is still a warning label, not a calculation.

The lesson

Honest comparison means letting the screen look incomplete. A university that never submitted a given dimension drops out of that table rather than being filled with a zero, and numbers that are not yet comparable have to say so.