Special Annual Awards
2008 Campus Technology Innovators: Business Intelligence
TRI-C PROJECT LEAD Jennifer Spielvogel worked to implement a better
way to access data quickly and prime it for campus decision-makers.
TECHNOLOGY AREA: BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
Innovator: Cuyahoga Community College
Via an outstanding centralized campus BI effort, campus
administrators and staffers don't just have access to data for
improved strategic decision-making; data are pushed to them
daily, to actually drive the decision-making process and help
them quickly spot and even anticipate students' problems.
At Ohio's Cuyahoga Community College (Tri-C), a recent
effort to revolutionize business intelligence has resulted in a
single version of data truth and a single means for understanding
student success. The resulting solution, One Institutional
Intelligence, was built on new business intelligence
technology from Microsoft. So far, at
least according to Joe Smucny, the college's vice president of
information technology services, the solution has allowed
more staffers to have more access to more data more often,
resulting in more frequent and better decision-making.
Data weren't always so organized, clean, and readily accessible
at Tri-C. Previously, for instance, the daily enrollment management
report took one individual anywhere from four to six
hours to compile-- a laborious process, to say the least. It was
no wonder, then, that in early 2007, project lead Jennifer Spielvogel,
VP of institutional planning and effectiveness, turned to
representatives from the Dayhuff Group, a local technology solution provider, to help the school
implement a better way to access data quickly and prime the
data for campus decision-makers.
After viewing the features of competing products from SAS, Business Objects, and Cognos, the team at Cuyahoga
opted to go with a multipoint solution from
Microsoft. The BI tools, which went live in November,
include Microsoft's SQL Server 2005, Integration
Services, Analysis Services, Reporting
Services, and ProClarity.