What Every Campus Leader Needs to Know About Analytics

The purpose of this White Paper is to help campus leaders understand the principles, potentials, and pitfalls of deploying enterprise analytics in higher education. It describes the evolution of analytics and compares the alternative options for building or buying analytic applications. The paper describes the emerging next generation of enterprise analytics in higher education and their implications for decision makers. The White Paper concludes with a checklist for assessing your institution’s current data, information, and analytics environment. From the start, we need to clarify two terms: analytic reporting tools and analytic applications. An analytic reporting tool (often referred to as a business intelligence tool or decision support tool) is a commercially-provided or homegrown toolkit that provides query, reporting, data mining, or other functionalities for end users. While these tools may provided rich reporting functionality, their capabilities for analytics are essentially dependent upon the richness and schematic of the data models to which they connect. In short, they provide little analytic capability when connected to normalized, transactional databases. Conversely, an analytic application is a complete, optimized, industry-specific solution that is customized to end-user needs. It enables front-line users to access, analyze, and act on information in the context of their institution’s business processes and key performance indicators (KPIs). Analyti