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A Business Intelligence Primer for Higher Education


 

Originally published February 17, 2009


Overview

Christina Rouse and Janet Kuster describe four highlights of a higher education business intelligence (BI) initiative: getting to “institutional intelligence,” application challenges for a typical business intelligence solution, scoping business intelligence deliverables, timeframes and cost, and sample dashboards for revenue and expense management.

Janet Kuster, MBA, PMP
Janet Kuster, MBA, PMP		Christina Rouse, Ph.D.
Christina Rouse, Ph.D.

SOURCE: A Business Intelligence Primer for Higher Education

 


 

Comments

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Posted June 9, 2009 by Fran Carr fran.carr@incisiveanalytics.com

I am pleased to see this article has prompted such good conversation! ~Fran

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Posted February 19, 2009 by Mark Conway mark.conway@oracle.com

Janet & Christina – excellent article and perspectives on the BI needs in HE. I am part of Oracle’s BI/EPM Global Business Unit and work with institutions of HE around BI both for administrative operations and with faculty on performance management –related curriculum development.  I was struck by many of your points and examples:

  • We too always stress that people, process, data and then enabling technologies is the way to plan for these projects.  It is NOT all about technology.
  • Investments upfront in the design and data management/integration/quality phase are key too. This is often the unglamorous, hard work but without a solid, well thought out process (say for master data management) the project will be problematic.
  • The idea of a pilot or “quick win” is certainly good advice. I recently saw a presentation by PwC that identified, small quick wins as a critical step in having a successful broader, enterprise scale project.
  • Finally, on the cost side of the equation, we often use the image of an iceberg to convey all of the “unexpected” costs that an institution needs to consider. Often times software licensing and hardware are the more visible expenses; but in sizing a project we encourage institutions to factor in training, implementation, maintenance and ongoing technical support to gain a fuller sense to the project’s overall cost.

 

As I am sure that you found, most institutions of higher education have deployed some kind of ERP/CRM system and have likely done a good job in driving down transactional expenses, optimizing business processes and boosting operational efficiencies.  With today’s increasing demands for accountability and institutional performance, schools now need to look improving their management process to gain better and faster insights to their performance. This is where the “take-action analytics” you describe can truly come into play.

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Posted February 17, 2009 by BIVish BIVish

This is a very good article/primer. I wonder as to what level of importance/consideration needs to be given for BI in higer education?

1. Data level security: Do you see that this needs to be implemented from the get go or as the end user audience of BI grows?

2. Need for anonymizing student personal information?

3. Personalization of dashboards and reports?

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