We closed our last blog entry with a table displaying a high-level matrix of KPIs, measures and dimensions for higher education institutions. A digital dashboard can portray the same tabular-format data in a more presentable way by displaying enrollment trends in colorful and meaningful graphs, alerts and notifications. Based on the analytical data presented, you will be able to understand your institution’s progress toward student enrollment goals. If your enrollment count does not meet the targeted goal for a particular term or academic year, the dashboard will trigger an alert indicating your current trend. This detailed and real-time analytical data will enable you to make more informed decisions for improving your enrollment trend in future terms.

Now let us look at a real-life scenario demonstrating this process. Let us say that in looking at your enrollment trend data displayed in the dashboard, you find that the Total Students count for African-American students has decreased for three consecutive terms. This is clearly an indication that you need to take certain actions to increase the African-American student enrollment in future terms. Having identified a problem, you can now take the precise action to fix it. In this case, your action might be to increase Financial Aid to African-American students in need, thus attracting more African-American candidates. This is what we call making an informed decision and taking effective action!

These are some key pointers that you need to take into consideration when defining KPIs, measures and dimensions:

1. Ensure that your KPIs are directly tied to your vision and mission statements
2. Ensure that you have set target goals
3. Ensure that the identified KPIs and measures are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound
4. Ensure that you have clearly defined each KPI and the benefits each can bring in managing institutional or campus performance
5. Ensure that the outlined KPIs, measures and dimensions are correctly mapped to business requirements

Over the last four blog entries, we have covered a strategic plan for defining KPIs, measures and dimensions for institutions of higher education. We have explored how to outline the KPIs tied to the institution’s vision and mission statements, how to measure the indicators and, finally, how to view the data elements related to measures. We hope these last few blog entries have provided you with the knowledge to begin designing your performance digital dashboard by identifying KPIs, measures and dimensions.

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

In a series of four blog entries, We’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, Synch-Solutions’ professionals have 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 us briefly explain the three key terms we will be using frequently 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.

We will begin to address these two issues in our next blog entry.

In this new era of modern technology, Higher Education is in the midst of rapid change in response to environmental, social, economic, technological and political transformations occurring worldwide. As a result, institutions of Higher Education are facing ever more numerous operational challenges. In order to survive these challenges, Higher Education needs new institutional strategies and decision-making processes. For a Higher Education institution to prosper and perform efficiently, all levels of campus staff and administration must collaborate to create a wave of change by implementing Business Intelligence to manage and monitor campus performance. Going one step higher, a digital dashboard provides a view of campus performance that can be directly mapped to campus vision and mission.

So to all Higher Education institutions out there, please take this opportunity to re-strategize your campus performance management in order to gain or maintain a competitive edge!

In our last entry, we 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

We’ll wrap up with our conclusions regarding the digital dashboard for Higher Education in our 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, we’ll discuss the role of the data warehouse in developing the digital dashboard for Higher Education. In our next entry, we’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, we will cover the Business Intelligence end of the Data Warehouse/Business Intelligence equation in our next blog entry.