The Lewis College of Business will have its inaugural Annual Stakeholder Engagement Conference Friday, April 15.

Director of Stakeholder Engagement for the LCOB Glen Midkiff said faculty, staff, students, members of the advisory board, administrators and community members are invited to offer suggestions.

“I think this first meeting is really to bring together all these different people to get information to help guide us to develop a plan for future improvements,” Midkiff said.

The idea behind having representatives is to have unique inputs. Alumni provide information on how the LCOB performed in the past, while current students provide insight into current performance. Community and business leaders provide the expectations of performance in the workforce, while external academics provides insight to how they are approaching similar issues within their school.

Planning committee faculty representative the Nancy Lankton said it’s important to have everyone together to develop common goals for the future of the college.

The conference is invitation only to assure there is an appropriate mixture of individuals from each group.

Lankton said the agenda is tentative, but there are two things they are hoping to cover, one of those things being a dashboard for the COB.

“We’re for sure going to be looking at our dashboard,” Lankton said. “A dashboard is a set of measures and targets that you want to achieve and companies have been using them for quite a while and universities are just starting to use them. It’s a way to get hard numbers to understand how you are performing.”

The organizers hope the stakeholders offer information on the college’s strengths and weaknesses.

“We put together an analysis as part of our strategic planning processes, and we’ve come up with our strengths and weaknesses, but we’d kind of like to share that with them and then see if there’s additional things in that aspect we haven’t looked at yet,” Lankton said.

The LCOB will generate a report on the outcomes of the conference for the participants.

Cheyenne DeBolt can be contacted at [email protected].