Using Analytics to Answer Important Institutional Questions

Answer important organizational questions through the effective use of analytics and business intelligence.

System integrations, implementations, and upgrades offer the opportunity to demonstrate the value of analytics and business intelligence to answer important questions related to progress on institutional goals. Overall, integrating data and systems can help improve your institution’s ability to make information-based (rather than intuition/gut-based) decisions.

To learn more about this key topic:

• Read the Overview: Get a quick overview of using system integrations or implementations to demonstrate the value of analytics and business intelligence.
• Hear from Your Peers:
  • In this set of EDUCAUSE Review case studies, discover how IT leaders at Ithaca College, Oregon State University, The George Washington University, and University of Mississippi are using enterprise system implementation or upgrade efforts to answer important institutional questions.
  • In this set of blogs, explore how three institutions used systems integrations, implementations, and/or upgrades to demonstrate the value of analytics:
    • Bucknell University
    • University of the Pacific 
    • University of Washington 
• Hear from Industry Leaders: Find advice and ideas from our corporate community about what systems, system integrations, or other tools you should know about to help demonstrate the value of analytics to make better information-based decisions. (Coming spring 2019)
• Explore Your Toolkit: Discover curated EDUCAUSE resources that can help you further improve your analytics and business intelligence maturity.

Improving Analytics and Business Intelligence Toolkit

Institutional Analytics in Higher Education	An examination of institutional analytics and four steps to move forward to increase analytics maturity
2018 Trends and Technologies: Analytics	Report from the 2018 Higher Education’s Top 10 Strategic Technologies and Trends research, covering the 13 trends and 13 technologies included in the analytics domain
Digital Capabilities in Higher Education, 2016: Analytics	An examination of higher education analytics maturity and deployment based on the EDUCAUSE Core Data Service
Building Institutional Analytics Maturity	Key takeaways from the 2015 EDUCAUSE/NACUBO IT Summit regarding where institutions should focus their efforts as they build analytics maturity
Moving the Red Queen Forward: Maturing Analytics Capabilities in Higher Education	An article about how colleges and universities can mature their analytics capabilities without working twice as hard
EDUCAUSE Analytics Services	EDUCAUSE Analytics Services provides higher education leaders with insights on peer institutions and benchmarks.
EDUCAUSE Library page on Analytics	EDUCAUSE articles, papers, and presentations on analytics
EDUCAUSE Library page on Business Intelligence	EDUCAUSE articles, papers, and presentations on business intelligence
EDUCAUSE Library page on IT Governance	EDUCAUSE articles, papers, and presentations to help IT support and enable institutional strategic objectives

Recommended Reading

Strategic

• Developing Strategies for Implementing Analytics
• Making Analytics Accessible, Understandable, and Actionable
• Business Intelligence Strategy
• The Journey from Business Intelligence to Lehman 360

Tactical

• The Dean’s Information Challenge: From Data to Dashboard
• Why Effective Analytics Requires Partnerships
• Planting the Seeds of Analytics
• Running a Business Intelligence Shop (four part series)
• Part One: Strategic Planning
• Part Two: Building the Organization
• Part Three: Managing the Work
• Part Four: Marketing Your Products

Implications across the Institution

• Resources for Presidents and Senior Executives: Administrative Systems and Services
• Analytics: Making Sense of the Jargon
• Predictive Analytics in Higher Education: Five Guiding Practices for Ethical Use