In my last blog entry, I laid out the basics for understanding the terms KPI, measure and dimension in the context of Business Intelligence for higher education institutions. In this entry, I’ll cover the means for defining Key Performance Indicators and measures that will drive your institution toward its strategic goals.

Let’s assume that your institution’s officers clearly understand all of the relevant external and internal environmental factors that impact the strategic goals, vision and mission directly. How must you then proceed to identify the indicators for measuring your institution’s position relative to its stated goals and objectives? What decisions must be made? What actions must be taken?

At this point, you may be overwhelmed with many unanswered questions. However, finding the right answers to these questions will guide you in defining the relevant KPIs, measures and dimensions accurately.

The very first step in identifying KPIs, measures and dimensions is meeting with the business users to understand their requirements for measuring institutional or campus performance. I’d suggest beginning with one functional area and then moving on to another. For example, Student Enrollment and Retention are two equally important indicators in the Student Administration functional area that all institutions want to measure. You can begin your requirements gathering in this area first. The business requirements will help you to identify the exact data elements needed for tracking performance in the Student Administration area. So in this case, your first KPI can be defined as Student Enrollment, and your second as Student Retention. Very good! You have successfully defined your first two KPIs!

Now, how will you track your student enrollment and retention? By head count? By percentage? By FTE? I apologize for throwing more questions your way, but, again, answering these questions will give you a clear picture of how to measure the critical indicators you defined earlier. Many colleges prefer to gauge enrollment trends based on these measures given below:

• Total Students – a head count of all students enrolled at the college.
• Developmental Students – a head count of developmental students only. Developmental students are those who have enrolled in developmental academic programs based on the Program Classification System (PCS) Code as defined by Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS).
• Full Time Equivalent (FTE) – computed based on students’ course credits.
• Student Status – examples would be new students (new to college without prior enrollment in any other colleges) and returning students (students who had dropped out earlier but have returned to the same campus).

These are just some sample measures that could help you to plan your work in identifying the measures related to the indicators defined earlier. Again, remember that these measures help you to track your progress and performance trends toward the predefined goals and objectives in your vision statement, while also meeting the business users’ requirements.

In my next blog entry, I’ll discuss how to define dimensions.

“Plan your work, and work your plan.” I strongly believe in this expression. I think you will agree that this motto applies well to strategic planning. If you fail to follow this guideline, you may fall victim to another of my favorite sayings, “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there.”

In a series of four blog entries, I’ll be discussing the best-known methods and best practices in identifying and defining the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), measures and dimensions used when building a digital dashboard that aligns with a higher education institution’s strategic goals and performance measurement plans.

In working with various institutions of higher education to implement Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence projects, I’ve gained a first-hand understanding of their organizational strategies, goals, visions, missions, plans and objectives. In order to stay competitive in this ever-changing and challenging socio-economy, many colleges are embracing new technologies to manage performance and enable informed decision-making. Business Intelligence applications such as dashboards are becoming popular performance management tools among institutions of higher education.

Before diving into the details, let me briefly explain the three key terms I will frequently be using in this discussion.

• Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), also known as Key Success Indicators or Metrics, help an organization define and evaluate how it is progressing toward its long-term organizational goals

• Measures refer to direct numerical variables that represent pieces of business data in relationship with one or more dimensions associated with a KPI

• Dimensions provide the means to view data elements that categorize measures

The aforementioned keywords are the foundations in developing a digital dashboard.

The biggest challenges are where to begin and how to plan.

I will begin to address these two issues in my next blog entry.

One positive effect  of the current recession is that it has produced some constructive thinking about money management. According to Ernst & Young’s Opportunities in adversity study, 82% of businesses say that “cash is now an issue.”  CIOs, like their counterparts across the organization, are seeking ways to conserve cash, and perhaps this crisis intervention orientation will be the start of some longer-term shifts in attitudes, behaviors and trends.  As the old adage goes, “Necessity is the mother of invention.” Recessions are very natural times for new attitudes, behaviors and trends to take hold, because “business as usual” is no longer working.  They are times to reflect on lessons learned.

The recession is raising consciousness, for example, about just how much money is being spent on IT maintenance and support.  As the role of IT has expanded within organizations, starting with pure data management, then moving on to information management, and then strategic knowledge management, maintenance and support costs have also expanded to consume a staggering 70% to 80% of IT budgets, according to Forrester Research.  It’s not uncommon for companies to own a multitude of data centers and hundreds of servers. 

One way to look at this problem is to simply acknowledge that this is the inevitable trend. But, the other way to look at it is that the cost-saving opportunity here is huge.  There is no question about the fact that adopting a managed services approach can save the organization significant amounts of money, because you are giving over day-to-day maintenance and support responsibilities to a firm that can take advantage of the economies of scale that come with being in the business of managing technology for a multitude of organizations.

The transition to managed services has been understandably difficult for many organizations to embrace.  First of all, it is big change, and change brings up the very natural and appropriate attention to risks.  Are there security or privacy risks, for example?   

As it goes with technology, however, continuous improvements have been made to ensure that the organization is not putting itself at risk with the transfer of IT maintenance and support to an outside partner.  The solutions have been baked in to ensure that your data is perhaps even more secure with an outside vendor that provides managed services for a living.  The risks have been addressed…and managed services should enable you to provide even more proactive and preventive support than can be provided internally.  This is because, to be a player in the managed services business, a vendor must have state-of-the-art equipment, processes and practices, all across the board.

And think what you could do with the budget freed up for more strategic work.  Your organization definitely needs to make the best use of the “I” in your “T,” but it does not need to have the “T” maintained and supported internally, at a cost that, almost invariably, far surpasses what can be provided by an external vendor. It’s the 21st century, and you now have a higher strategic calling.  Your organization needs you to free up dollars to invest in strategic innovations that improve the financial position of your organization, better serve your customers and, if yours is a commercial enterprise, give you a differential advantage.

In the other two blog entries in this series, I gave hints and tips for the agile Business Analyst up to the stage of documenting business requirements. In this entry, I will address the follow-up to that phase of the project life cycle with a few more tips.

• Once the requirements document is approved and signed-off, assist the team with the next step – System Design and Test Script/Test Case development work.
     • Be prepared to answer questions regarding the requirements.
• Take the role as liaison between the user community and the technical team.
     • The BA is the communication broker between the users and the IT team. As an ambassador of business and functional knowledge, you must be able to convey the business requirements clearly to both the Developers and the Quality Assurance Analyst.
• Participate in Change Management Board Meetings.
     • Document and track all the changes taking place.
• Participate in User Acceptance Testing (UAT).
     • In many cases, BAs don’t get involved in UAT sessions. However, from my experience, BAs must be prepared to play an important role in UAT to address the user testing phase.

Remember, Business Analysts do not merely document business requirements, but they also serve as liaisons and communication brokers between the technical team and the user community. Doing things right from the beginning will reduce the likelihood of making wrong steps during project development.

I wish luck to all the Business Analysts out there. Thanks for taking the time to read my blog entries.

In my last blog entry, I gave some suggestions of how the agile Business Analyst should lay the groundwork prior to gathering business requirements. In this entry, I will give some tips for the agile BA covering the next couple of main project stages.

• Gathering Business Requirements
     • During your first meeting with business users, gather the High-Level Requirements.
     • Always keep your discussions within scope of the project.
     • If any requirements are out of scope, document them for future enhancements.
     • Diligent users seeking to do their jobs right typically want everything. But remember not all the requirements are critical to business – some could be just ‘nice to have.’ Negotiate with business users and other stakeholders to identify the requirements that will add the most value to the business.
     • If you receive conflicting requirements from different business users, call a meeting to address the gaps. Get the users to justify and prioritize the requirements based on importance and criticality to business.
     • Never offer technical solutions for current issues on the spot, but rather document all issues and take them to your technical team for discussion. Then come up with solutions that can be shared with the business users.
     • Document all the points and send them to the business users after the meeting. This will ensure that the points are correctly conceived, and, if any are wrongly captured, that the business users will have the opportunity to correct them.

• Leading Joint Application Development (JAD) sessions
     • Realize that it will be next to impossible to get developers and other team members, as well as other stakeholders, together all at once to sit in a room and brainstorm about system design.
     • Be willing and able to play the lead role in administering, managing and facilitating JAD sessions.

• Documenting the Business Requirements
     • When you develop the business requirements document, spell out the details clearly, without any ambiguity or vague points. Use simple words to describe the requirements.
     • Present the requirements with diagrams, flow charts or pictures. Remember, “a picture is worth 1,000 words!”
     • For effectiveness, use Use Case or UML diagrams to present the details.
     • Use MS Visio to present the workflow models or business processes clearly.
     • Provide both ‘AS-IS’ and ‘TO-BE’ models, so that business users can compare and understand the differences.

In my next blog entry, I will wrap up this series with some tips for the agile Business Analyst during the stages that follow the documentation of business requirements.

This morning as I sat in front of my laptop to write this blog entry and share my thoughts with fellow bloggers, I remembered the very first time I was hired as a Systems Analyst, about ten years ago. For a minute, I indulged myself in a brief walk down memory lane. As a fresh grad with burning desires to take any challenges thrown my way, I had my share of ups and downs. The struggles to blend my student mindset with corporate professionalism are not easy to describe. However, they made me who I am now: a Senior Business Analyst, having a certain level of expertise in terms of both functional and technical knowledge, but still craving new knowledge and challenges on day-to-day basis.

The objective of this article is to share my working experience through some tips for the agile Business Analyst. Like those in some other IT roles, Business Analysts play a significant role in ensuring a smooth project implementation. If you consider the multiple phases of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) or Project Life Cycle (PLC), the business requirement gathering phase is the very first phase in the project pipeline. A precise and concise set of business requirements are the strength, backbone and foundation of the project implementation activities. Business Analysts are the people who face the firing squad of Business Users, Developers, Quality Assurance Analysts and other project team members, as well as other Stakeholders. They get involved in the early stages of the project, remain with the project as it evolves from one phase to another, work as a liaison between business users and developers, are fully accountable for the accuracy of requirements, produce documentation, and the list goes on.

First up, I will cover the preliminary stage, in which we do all of our groundwork prior to gathering the business requirements, along with some general hints and tips for the agile BA.

• Do your homework 
      • Take time to research the company history, business background and stakeholders.  This knowledge will increase your confidence when addressing the company’s business users or other stakeholders.
• Be prepared 
      • Develop questionnaires related to business processes, business user expectations, etc.
      • Prior to a meeting, send the agenda to business users so that they can be properly prepared.
• Be creative
      • Open yourself up to unconventional solutions.
• Communicate well
      • You are an ambassador representing the IT group. You must be able to communicate well not only with your teammates but also with business users, managers and everyone with a stake in the project.
• Break the rules 
      • Don’t take this to mean that you should literally break any of the company rules or policies. What I’m trying to say is that you should break the traditional way of capturing business requirements by incorporating new techniques, tools and methodologies in your requirement-gathering activities.
      • Explore options to present requirements in a strategic way that others will understand.
• Control the interview sessions
      • Always stick to your agenda and questionnaire topics.

In my next entry, I will continue through the project stages of gathering and documenting business requirements.

In my last entry, I discussed the data warehouse’s role in the digital dashboard for Higher Education. In parallel to the data warehousing technology, Business Intelligence (BI) is a system of reports, metrics and dashboards designed to drive decisions that optimize an organization’s performance. Reports, scorecards and digital dashboards are some BI applications that could be designed using data warehousing technology. Business Intelligence components reside on the data warehousing platform to enable end users to access them more efficiently.

BI performance management software for Higher Education enables you to:
• Calculate curriculum costs
• Identify good fundraising programs and sources (e.g., Alumni)
• Monitor student headcount and performance, program outcomes, school reputation, national agendas and other KPIs
• Share secure Web-based information with all stakeholders
• Manage endowments and recruitment through driver-based planning
• Spot high- and low-performance schools or programs
• Map enrollment to attendance and attendance to performance
• Speed compliance reporting

I’ll wrap up with my conclusions regarding the digital dashboard for Higher Education in my next entry.

Data warehouse and Business Intelligence go hand-in-hand with the design requirements of a digital dashboard for Higher Education. The data warehouse provides a platform to store campus-wide information from multiple operational datamarts. In this entry, I’ll discuss the role of the data warehouse in developing the digital dashboard for Higher Education. In my next entry, I’ll cover how to improve performance using Business Intelligence.

Executives at Higher Education institutions are increasingly in need of timely and accurate information to make critical business decisions, assess risks against benchmarks and respond quickly to market changes. Like growing commercial industries, Higher Education is in need of accurate, timely and relevant information on which to base decisions, not only for long-term planning, but also to address day-to-day developments. In order to store vast amounts of historical data electronically and to facilitate reporting and analysis work, Higher Education needs to develop the proper data warehousing architecture.

Business Intelligence applications rely on Data Warehouses, as they function as database repositories designed to support a company’s decision-making process. Information populated on digital dashboards are extracted and transformed from Data Warehouses. For bloggers, a digital dashboard is an aggregation of different types of information accessible from a single Web page.

Data warehouses are assuming a more strategic role in making these business decisions, addressing these three challenges:
1.        Delivering near real-time data
2.        Integrating the applications that make the best use of the data
3.        Providing transparent access to systems that contain business-critical data

Solving these challenges typically requires retrieving and analyzing data; extracting, transforming and loading data; and managing the elements of the data dictionary. Data warehouses are optimized for speed of data retrieval, so even for the largest databases, retrieval speed is not a major concern. Multi-dimensional modeling and denormalized data are key factors that contribute to the fast and efficient performance of a data warehouse that directly expedites the data population on a digital dashboard.

Again, I’ll cover the Business Intelligence end of the Data Warehouse/Business Intelligence equation in my next blog entry.

When we ask executives at Higher Education institutions how they assess campus performance, they may share 10 or more key metrics that they track on a regular basis. These key metrics, known as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), are sets of measures that track the effectiveness of a college or university in meeting its mission, goals and fiduciary responsibilities. KPIs represent the “vital signs” of the college’s performance against a predefined benchmark. They form a balanced scorecard that should give a strong indication of the institution’s health and progress. KPIs are always associated with a list of measures that scales the school’s performance. Thus, KPIs are directly derived from key focus areas that align with the institution’s vision and mission, and they aid it in achieving its goals.

Accordingly, development of a set of Key Performance Indicators should follow these guidelines:
• Do not confuse the number of indicators with their usefulness in decision-making. A greater number of indicators does not necessarily result in more or better information.
• Address issues of validity and reliability when creating indicators. Do they actually measure what you intend them to? Should you compare the results to those of other institutions and systems? If so, can you qualify your comparisons by identifying institutions and systems that are comparable in vision, mission and experience with assessment?
• Be sure to clarify how the indicators will be used. Recognize the different purposes inherent in public accountability and institutional improvement agendas.
• Develop performance indicators that represent all aspects of the institution.
• Use a variety of methods, both qualitative and quantitative, to capture, analyze and report your findings.
• Link performance indicators to institutional processes to improve performance and inform decision-making.
• Communicate clearly with all relevant constituencies – internal and external – concerning the goals, development, and reporting of data related to performance indicators.
• Ensure that all stakeholders are included in and participate in the development process

In my next entry, I’ll explain a little about the data warehouse’s role in the digital dashboard for Higher Education.

Like other industries, Higher Education has adopted and accepted the digital dashboard, a Business Intelligence system, to manage the information of day-to-day operations related to recruiting, enrollments, student information, finance, etc., that drives institutional excellence. A major challenge for Higher Education is to manage the continued expansion of campus information in an analytical way in order to gain insights at the aggregate level. Business Intelligence plays an essential role in developing strategies for institutional effectiveness.

Digital dashboards highlight department- or institution-wide performance and trends against goals for recruiting and admissions, enrollment, financial aid, student billing, student retention and more. By having a clear understanding of the strategic impacts of their decisions and assumptions, campus executives can be more nimble in their decision-making. In summary, Business Intelligence is all about getting the critical performance information that the campus executives need, when they need it, in a form that’s easy to understand and deliver to all consumer levels.

Higher Education uses Business Intelligence to gain key insights that can dramatically improve college/university performance. These solutions provide key metrics and information, tailored to the needs of executives, that measure the performance of an institution and facilitate strategic vision and planning. Campus Executives use Key Performance Indicators to manage and monitor overall campus performance. Dashboard, Scorecard and Reports are some of the BI technologies being used to manage, monitor and view the Key Performance Indicators.

For my next blog entry, I thought it would be helpful to bullet point some benefits of the digital dashboard for Higher Education.