A five-year Impact Report from the School of Continuous Improvement finds its own fleet-uptime dashboard tile and an independently walked service check moving apart as the campus robot fleet grew.
The School of Continuous Improvement's latest retrospective follows the University's path-cleaning and delivery robots from their 2021 arrival to the dashboard tile the School has since learned to double-check
A fleet arrives quietly, and a dashboard tile learns to speak for it. That, in brief, is the arc the School of Continuous Improvement’s newest five-year Impact Report traces, from the 2021 rollout of the University’s autonomous path-cleaning and delivery robots to the uptime figure now sitting at the centre of the School’s Living Dashboard.
The report’s headline finding is not that the fleet is unreliable, but that “available” and “working” have quietly become the same word on the dashboard that watches it. Cross-reading five years of the tile’s own figure against an independently walked service check run by the Evaluation of Evaluation programme, the School found the two measures moving together while the fleet was small and drifting apart as it grew, exactly the kind of divergence the University’s own audit machinery exists to catch.
An uptime figure is a claim about a machine. A service figure is a claim about the campus it serves. We spent five years learning to ask which one the dashboard was actually making.
— Joost Nwosu, Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Continuous Improvement
Dr Dagny Okafor, Lecturer and Convenor of Evaluation of Evaluation, welcomed the report’s candour about its own instruments: “A School that reviews everyone else’s dashboards owes its own the same visit, eventually.”
The full Impact Report is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.jaiykp.