Archive for the ‘Higher Education’ category

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Is the Cart Still Before the Horse?

October 29th, 2009

I’m quite excited because we are currently reviewing some designs for an executive dashboard.  Now that we finally have lots of beautiful dimensionally modelled data in our warehouse with periodic snapshots going back almost 3 years, we are actually at a point where we can present some of it together in a highly aggregated manner to hopefully inform, influence and improve strategic decision making at our institution.

cart_before_horse

I first used the above slide back in 2007 at the Cognos Asia-Pacific Forum to remind people that dashboards are the veneer of a BI/DW platform.  You simply cannot sustain an integrated dashboard without the underlying atomic data and that data takes a long time to get.  The quote I read at the time still stands:

“…the worst case theme is often called a scorecard or executive dashboard. This deceptively simple application draws on data from almost all business processes in the organisation. You can’t create the entire dashboard until you’ve built the whole warehouse foundation. Or worse you end up building the dashboard by hand every day, manually extracting, copying, and pasting data from all those sources to make it work. It can be difficult to get business folks to understand the magnitude of the effort involved in creating this ’simple’ report.” Ralph Kimball

So now that we have the data, you might think it relatively easy to create that dashboard, the one that people have been clamoring for since we started this wonderful process…

There are, it seems, an endless stream of people proclaiming what wonderful dashboards they have in their organisations but yet when you look a little more closely they often appear to be a disjointed jumble of content thrown together like one of those fuzzy felt pictures you used to play with at pre-school - lots of bright distracting pictures pointing all over the place, sort of related and sort of telling you an overall story, but then again not really.  They catch the attention for a few seconds and then, purpose served, their time is done.

It seems odd that this situation prevails, I wonder why that might be.  It certainly isn’t helped by the major vendors in the BI space who seem to believe that their purpose is to appeal to the fuzzy felt designers.

Working in BI/DW in higher education clearly means we all like a challenge and this is up there with the best I’ve had cause to think about recently.  How to effectively map the major processes of a university on a single screen, in an enduring manner, and in a way that simply and rapidly communicates an overall situation.  I’ll keep you posted…

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Posted in Business Intelligence, Dashboards, Higher Education, Visualisation

New Higher Ed Online Forum

October 21st, 2009

Just a quick one in case you weren’t aware.  The Higher Education Data Warehousing forum has now progressed from a humble listserv to a website at  http://hedw.org.  Membership is free and open to anyone with an email address with an edu extension - worldwide.

hedw1_0

At the moment the listserv mailing list is running in parallel but as I understand it, the plan is to review the list and perhaps create additional or replacement lists for direct correspondence in the future.

One of the immediate benefits of registering for the new site is that you can see the product and version number of the BI platform used at each of the registered institutions along with details of the ERP system where one exists.  As of right now there are already 28 registered institutions and 122 registered users.

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Posted in Data Warehousing, Higher Education

100 and counting…

October 14th, 2009

I must admit just over a year ago when I started this blog, I didn’t expect the experience would be quite so rewarding and enjoyable and I certainly didn’t expect to still be going over a year later.  This is the 100th post since that date and I therefore thought it fitting to celebrate the maiden century with The Times Top 100 University Rankings.

The Times Higher Education – QS World University Rankings exist to give students, academics, funders, politicians and policymakers, a broad view of the top institutions in world higher education.

This graphic from Brent Eades illustrates the rather limited geographical spread of those top 100 universities rather nicely.  I can see another version of this, weighted by population coming soon…

top_unis

Rankings are an emotive mechanism, as Times Higher Education Deputy Editor Phil Baty would no doubt be acutely aware.  I’ve come to realise this also just of late with some quite strong reaction to simple measurements that we are producing with our BI/DW platform.

You can find out more and download all the University Rankings for the last 6 years here.

You only have to review the comments on Baty’s Talking Points post to see that everyone has a view on this.  There is also a very interesting article from Jamil Salmi and Roberta Malee Bassett called Measures Matter that eloquently raises some great points and in summary, notes

As acceptance - begrudging or otherwise - of rankings has settled into the tertiary education environment, the debate has moved on to how to improve their methodology to provide more useful and legitimate data on which to base well-informed decisions.

That pretty much sums up my stance on the use of measurement in Higher Education.  We’re still finding our way and discovering how best to combine the discipline of statistics with the powerful number crunching and visualisation capabilities of BI/DW platforms to serve both business and academic imperatives.  Yes, we have a long way to go and we can refine and improve what we do, but right now we operate in an era where we can enjoy timely access to information previously only dreamed of.  Surely we all have a responsibility to embrace that opportunity and collectively pursue the information-led transformation of our organisations.

Do you use measurement in your organisation?  Does your organisation appear in the one of the world rankings?  What is the general perception of these rankings and is there a correlation between ranking and perception?

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Posted in Business Intelligence, Higher Education

University Web Searches

October 2nd, 2009

Last month’s post about the correlation between course searches and enrolments has provoked quite a lot of discussion and comment and led me to look into Google Insights for Search which tells us about the number of searches for a particular term relative to the total number of searches done on Google.

The image below is a summary of searches for UWS, Deakin and QUT since 2004.  The interesting bit is perhaps the rise in searches for UWS in that timeframe.

google-insights-universities

You can look at the results by region.  For Australia unfortunately that only seems to be state but still it confirms what one would expect - that Deakin has most searches originating in Victoria, UWS in New South Wales and QUT in Queensland:

regional-interest

Fans of maps can see an interesting visualisation ‘movie’ that replays the number of searches for one of the search terms over the period of the analysis.  In this case here is the latest map for Deakin searches:

deakin-map

You can also see a further breakdown of any of the given search terms.  In this case here are the ones for UWS.

uws-search-terms

And finally, a list of search terms that are increasing in popularity for a given period.  In this case, the last 12 months for UNSW.  Breakout indicates over 5000% increase in search volume for the period.

unsw-rising-searches

It is interesting but I’m not quite sure how this information can be used in our higher education context.  Maybe that is why Google label the facility as a way to ’see what the world is searching for’.

Check what the world has been searching for in the last month and you’ll find Patrick Swayze, The US Open and the German elections featuring pretty highly.  Hmm…

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Posted in Australia, Google, Higher Education

Customer (student) Analytics

September 29th, 2009

deakin_logo

Michael Gibson provides us with his own interesting twist on Customer Analytics in another of our Guest Posts from Australian Universities (you can read all previous guest posts here)

Michael is Data Warehouse Manager at Deakin University in Victoria, Australia.

Last week I attended a 2 day Customer Analytics seminar up the road in Melbourne where one of our academics was presenting.  The free tickets were offered to me because my responsibility in BI seemed to be a close match (and because I suspect they needed to fill a few vacant seats).  While we don’t do anything directly in this space at Deakin, I still wanted to attend because I have used BI to do some of this stuff in the past, I have a background in marketing, and I’m always looking to learn new things and expand my horizons.

While some of the presentations were only partly relevant or simplistic, there were a couple that caused me to think about how the concepts could be applied in Higher Education – and I have to say that some of the ideas match quite closely to some important issues previously identified by Universities.

Customer Analytics (sometimes called Customer Insights) is a relatively new discipline that seeks to understand customer behaviour by analysing primary and secondary sources of data in order to predict future behaviour (an established practice we might know as Predictive Analytics).

People automatically assume this is used by the private sector to work out how to extract more money from our pockets, but this is only partially true.  Organisations also use this technology to improve social outcomes and drive greater operational efficiencies.  Some examples were given by a few government departments (inlc. the ATO).

You’d be surprised at how many (usually large) organisations are doing this currently.  The Insurance industry is going crazy over this stuff at the moment, partially to understand how high they can set your premiums before you decide to leave them (which they like to call pricing optimisation).

What does this mean for Higher Ed?  Well, by creating a ‘Student Insights’ function and better understanding students, universities can realistically achieve some of the goals they always seem to be banging on about, including;

  • Lowering attrition rates
  • Increasing academic performance of students
  • Better targeted courses and units
  • Better employment outcomes
  • Delivering better services to students
  • Process improvement / operational efficiencies
  • Converting enquiries into enrolments
  • Attracting desirable students through more effective marketing

Some Unis already dedicate some time to better understanding students to achieve the above, but I doubt it is done using these sorts of sophisticated techniques (I’d be happy to hear of, or from anyone who does).

The statistics presented on the benefits obtained by using such techniques is very compelling, just as BI itself usually mounts a strong business case, so too does customer analytics – but only if the organisation truly sees the potential value and can drive the initiative well. An organisation really needs to be customer centric to make this work.

There is obviously a large degree of commonality with the aims of BI, and a strong BI capability is necessary to do this well.

I imagine there’d be several areas within Universities interested in this type of capability (and not just the marketing folks), but I suspect it will be some time before we see anyone doing this well.

Several institutions in the US have used this type of capability to great effect, improving the quality and quantity of their applications, increasing student grades and lowering attrition – and increasing donations form alumni of course.

Michael Gibson
Data Warehouse Manager
Deakin University

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Posted in Guest Post, Higher Education