Advanced MIS: Smarter notifications make them care

Using Talis Aspire Advanced Management Information System (MIS), you can easily find out about lists or items that have some data condition that you want people to care about. You might want people to care that their list is considered unloved if it has not been updated for a couple of months. Or maybe they should care that items on their list should have item importance set.  Find out how data in Talis Aspire Advanced MIS can power notifications that make people care.

When we talk about notifications we are making an assumption that someone wants to be notified.  So when we plan to send a message as a notification we have to think hard about why someone would want to take notice about the notification.

Any notification that we send needs to be engaging and prompt the user into action.  Getting the message right is arguably the hardest part, but you will know best how to approach your audience and how to then write your messages in a way which resonates.

From a technical point of view, you first need to find out what it is you want to notify about. For this post, we’re going to focus on the idea of notifying people that a list may need to be published as changes may not be live.

If you are using Talis Aspire Advanced MIS you can use our list owner notifications recipe to find the lists and users to notify. This will give you a list of names, email addresses and the details of the affected lists which you can then drop into a pipeline that builds the actual email.

Scheduling in business intelligence tools like Power BI and Tableau is possible, though this is more suited to the scheduling of a whole report, but if your goal is to let Academic Subject Liaison Librarians know that a set of lists might need action, then this can be an effective way of getting the report to them on a regular basis without additional effort. 
 

 
If you want to aim for real techy happiness, you can use something like Node Red to build a pipeline that gets the data from Talis Aspire Advanced MIS, formats it into individual email messages, and then sends them out. A simple working example can be set up in a few minutes, and Node Red has some great tools to add scheduling and other formatting to customise dates. We put this video together to show you how it works in Node Red:

https://fast.wistia.com/embed/medias/6es1dlkat3.jsonphttps://fast.wistia.com/assets/external/E-v1.js

To find out more about Talis Aspire Advanced MIS, please raise a support ticket.