Carol Rogers serves as director of the Indiana Business Research Center at the IU Kelley School of Business.
Rogers also sits on a number of boards, including the national Council for Community and Economic Research (C2ER) and the national Labor Market Information Institute (LMI-I). She works extensively with economic developers, government officials, businesses and nonprofits throughout Indiana and the nation to provide them with insights yielded from data and research. Today, Rogers is helping the IBRC move into its second century of service to Indiana. Since 1925, the center has persistently, consistently and imaginatively studied the economy and people of the state, sharing its insights and data in ways that can be used in people’s everyday work or their grand strategies. IBRC publications and websites have tens of thousands of users and have won both accolades and awards.
Rogers has spent her professional career focused on translating research and data into usable digital information for the business, economic development, government, education and nonprofit sectors. Always curious and questioning, Carol took those attributes to graduate school, where she focused on information science and technology. Discovering her aptitude for statistics, her graduate work focused on early forms of computer-assisted citation analysis, combining programming algorithms with databases to reveal the patterns and frequency of citations in twenty years’ worth of doctoral dissertations.
Significant administrative records integration projects were undertaken by Rogers in the mid-2000s and 2010s, with one of the first in the country built in partnership with Indiana’s Workforce and Higher Education agencies. Gateway for Indiana Local Government was another initiative that was built as both a data collection platform but also as a web portal for public dissemination of critical tax and finance data. It continues to be an excellent example of how collaboration between State government and a State university can improve transparency for citizens.
