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?’”

Driving the Data: Applying Business Intelligence at Community Colleges

An interesting look by Anne McClure at what a number of community colleges are doing in this area:

The most important part of BI is getting people to ask the right questions, notes Rafn, whose institution receives on-site technical support from SunGard. NWTC employees are receiving training that will help build a culture of evidence on campus. All constituents also have the ability to run ad hoc reports to find the information they need. After all, Rafn points out, if people have to go through the IT department, "they either don't ask or they create something outside the system."

DeHart echoes the sentiment. "We're trying to get away from the burden of one person running all the reports." End users at DMACC can create and save data sets on their own. And DeHart's starting to see a culture shift. "In higher ed, if you ask people what they want they won't know, but if you give them something to respond to, it gives them ideas. They'll see a report and ask for budget data too."

But being data driven isn't easy or inexpensive. "It complicates our lives to a degree," Drennon says, adding that making an investment up front is critical to staying competitive and retaining State Fair's niche, since students have many educational options.

Business Intelligence Tool Means Healthy Data at UVA

We always say, "The technology is the easy part." The planning for and implementation of an enterprise 'business intelligence' system at the University of Virginia Department of Medicine certainly bears that out:

The rollout was a three-year effort--although what took most of the time wasn't the software installation itself. "The technology end is so easy that we rolled [WebFOCUS] out to the entire department at once," Zang said. Instead, the brunt of project time was spent creating business rules designating how the accounting data should be handled. That was a complex process because the two accounting systems that WebFOCUS accesses--Oracle Financials for the university, and a system called Epicor for outpatient billing by the School of Medicine--are set up to use different fiscal years and different general ledgers. "We had to figure out how to marry up the two," Zang explained.