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.

To help you define the dimensions associated with the measures identified above, you need to ask more questions! How do you want to view the enrollment trend? By Gender? Ethnicity? Academic Program? Term? Academic Year?

Here are some sample Dimensions you may use to view your data:

1. Gender – enables you to view enrollment by Female or Male head count
2. Ethnicity – enables you to view enrollment by ethnic group (African-American, Asian, Hispanic, etc.)
3. Academic Program – enables you to view enrollment by programs in which students are enrolled
4. Term – enables you to view enrollment by summer, fall and spring terms

Through our exercises, you have definitely laid the groundwork for identifying KPIs, measures and dimensions associated with your institution’s strategic goals.

The table below shows the high-level matrix of KPIs, measures and dimensions:

In our next blog entry, we will explain the use of digital dashboards to display the data represented in the tabular graphic above.

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. We’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 our next blog entry, we will discuss how to define dimensions.

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!

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.

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.

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

We have mentioned Key Performance Indicators in a couple of my blog entries. We will discuss these further in our next entry.

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 our next blog entry, we thought it might be helpful to bullet point some benefits of the digital dashboard for Higher Education.

A digital dashboard is a Business Intelligence system designed along the lines of an automobile dashboard display system. However, digital dashboard is enhanced with sophisticated features that display real-time data in a more interactive and presentable way with color-coded visual effects – graphical representations of gauges and depictions that summarize institutional performance. While an automobile dashboard displays a speedometer, fuel gauge, temperature gauge, etc., the digital dashboard displays a Higher Education institution’s performance indicators with multiple gauges—in this case Key Performance Indicators, such as Retention Rate, Enrollment, Student Graduation Rate, Transfer Rate, etc. Much as a driver does with the automobile, college and university executives take appropriate actions based on alerts provided by the indicators.

In our next entry, we will share some thoughts on the digital dashboard as a Business Intelligence tool.