To meet these challenges, educational institutions are faced with a dilemma. They must either (A) continuously modify their current Student Administration systems to address the new requirements, or (B) upgrade their current Student Administration systems to incorporate new requirements.

At the HEUG (Higher Education User Group) Alliance 2009 conference in Anaheim, California, Oracle addressed the educational challenges by stating the following commitments, relative to its PeopleSoft Campus Solutions product:
- Minimize operational disruption and the capital costs that have often been experienced with major upgrades
- Deliver Campus Solutions as a stand-alone instance
- Give customers options for HCM (Human Capital Management) integration

The release of Campus Solutions 9.0 achieves these goals by offering the following for upgrade customers:
- Campus Solutions 9.0 (CS 9.0) will be the base foundation application being supported.
- CS 9.0 will be independent of HCM 9.1 (CS 9.0 remains connected to HCM 9.0).
- Additional changes will be implemented using feature packs. A feature pack is one or more enhancements and/or one or more new features that can be applied directly to the current release, without an upgrade event.
- Campus Solutions products will be migrated to service-enabled technology over time.
- CS 9.0 includes enhancements and features that were originally targeted for CS 9.1.
- HCM 9.1 and CRM 9.1 integration are included.
- Service-enabled core product modules (Admissions, Enrollment, etc.) are included.

For those who choose the Oracle legacy path (option A), the caveats are as follows:
- If you are on Campus Solutions 8.9 or earlier, support will last only the next few years and will vary by support contract.
- Any future government-mandated changes will require software customizations.
- Maintenance to legacy systems will need to address both new requirements and modifications to old requirements.

The key benefit in the upgrade option is no further upgrade events. Anyone who has gone through an upgrade realizes the resources, expenses and time needed for such an endeavor. Limiting that impact by using service-enabled (e.g, Oracle Fusion or Java-based) modules is clearly a step in the right direction, and minimizes the impact on costs and resources.

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.

CUNY enrolls 400,000 students and, with all of its 10,000 faculty members and employees included, has about 500,000 people moving through the campuses of its 23 colleges in New York City every day. CUNY occupies 29 million square feet of real estate and consumes 1% of the city’s entire energy load. The system is huge and, right now, it is embarking on changes that will make a huge impact on the environment. The goal is to reduce the institution’s carbon footprint by 30% by 2017.

From an IT perspective, CUNY is changing out all legacy systems and deploying Oracle/PeopleSoft as its base for gaining efficiencies and reducing energy usage. But that is only a small part of the plan. It’s comprehensive, with high participation across all campuses. From the sound of it, the initiative is extremely well orchestrated and no stone has been left unturned.

Check out the CUNY Web site to learn more. You may also be interested in checking out their October 30, 2008, Sustainability Conference. CUNY is committed to minimizing its ecological impact and investing the resources to “construct, retrofit and maintain more sustainable facilities,” and they want to share ideas to ensure success. In addition to the October 30 conference, CUNY is forming an advisory board consisting of a broad spectrum of industry leaders from financial services and utility companies, as well as the “new green industry.”

We’re impressed with this undertaking and wish CUNY the highest degree of success. The road to sustainability will certainly require a sustained effort, and it sounds like they have put the foundation in place to move their enormous and highly complex institution successfully along the path toward their vision. GO CUNY!

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.