Business Intelligence: From Data to Information

An interesting article, with a couple of mini-case studies and some bulleted specific "what to look for" suggestions about purchasing systems:

“Historically we had programmers, and we could ask them some specific questions, and they’d go off, and if we were lucky they’d come back sometime in our lifetime with the answer to our questions,” recalls Richard Burnette, FSU’s director of student information management. “Or else we had a number of fixed reports that we’d been using for years to track where we were and plan strategically off of them. That’s not very flexible.”

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Only within the last decade, says industry analyst Nicole Engelbert of Datamonitor, has higher education began effectively exploiting BI solutions. Even then, it was something of a luxury reserved for the largest institutions. But external trends have made BI much more attractive to a wider range of IHEs. “Institutions are under a lot of pressure from a productivity and efficiency perspective,” she says. “There’s a lot of push for accountability—from the federal government, state governments in some cases, accrediting bodies, even from the U.S. News & World Report. ... That’s pushed high-level decision-makers to think, ‘How can we do better? How do we know if we’re doing better, and what should we do to do better?’”