Cornell Takes Visual Approach to Data Analysis

After a false start or two, business officers and others at Cornell are pretty satisfied with some of their current financial reporting:

More and more, Sedlacek said, top business officers from the 11 colleges--who function as CEOs of each college, essentially--were asking for better access to critical data they needed to make decisions. "They wanted metrics at their fingertips," Sedlacek said, such as faculty and student retention numbers, enrollment rates, and expenditures. "A lot of this is very hard information to get. It takes a lot of time." Often, by the time the data can be collected and verified, she said, the numbers are out of date.

In the spring of 2007, the KPI committee decided to address the need by purchasing an enterprise BI tool. But after spending eight months implementing the software, training the KPI technical team, and holding various meetings, "we didn't have much to show," Sedlacek said.