The image of the staid, ivory tower is fast receding in higher education as schools learn to adapt quickly to both internal and external pressures. With greater accountability and fiercer competition for students, historical reporting is no longer sufficient to anticipate and respond to the rapid changes in educational trends and student populations.
Colleges and universities collect vast amounts and types of data - but it's spread across different schools, departments and campuses in various formats and a multitude of systems. It's a massive challenge to make all that data available, connected and usable to everyone who needs it. Traditionally, IT (and institutional research) departments stretched their resources as best they could to support reporting requests, but this took time, rendering the information less useful. It is no longer viable for would-be users to wait for IT to free up resources to deliver results. Higher education institutions want to evolve into using their data for a more proactive and interactive flow of information for decision-making at all levels - at a faster pace.
Business intelligence and analytics tools can provide critical support to help colleges and universities give users much needed self-reporting access to data and information for strategic decision-making.
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