Customer story · Emerson College
Attaining the college’s reporting objectives with a move to Argos
Emerson College replaced a powerful but hard-to-use BI tool with Argos and met the goals it had set: a centralized data repository, clearer dashboards, and end users who run their own reports.
Boston, Massachusetts
Private, 4-year college
Argos
- Consistent, accessible dataA centralized repository makes reporting data easier to reach and more consistent.
- Simpler user securityManaging report user security is now a simpler process.
- Fewer copies, fewer silosDepartments run their reports without replication or departmental silos.
Emerson College at a glance
1880
Founded
5,876+
Students
1,990+
Faculty and staff
32
Undergraduate programs
18
Graduate programs
01
The challenge
Powerful, but too few people wanted to use it
Emerson College had a reporting and business intelligence tool in place. It was powerful and had a large variety of features. Yet it lacked more and more of what Emerson needed, and it was starting to negatively affect the college’s operations.
Not intuitive
Many end users found it hard to use, which hampered their willingness to use it.
Uneven use
Partly as a result, its use was inconsistent across campus.
Heavy on IT
It required too much of IT’s time and resources to maintain.
And while the tool was meeting some of Emerson’s reporting and analytics needs, significant goals remained. Emerson wanted to establish reporting standards and uniform processes to support institutional decision making, and to create dashboards with easy-to-navigate metrics.
It also needed to connect to multiple systems, bringing structured and unstructured data into a centralized data source, and to clearly present insights and trends that could support strategic decisions affecting the college’s growth. Emerson was not confident it could achieve these goals with the tool it had.
02
The solution
Chosen by the people who would use it
Emerson’s IT staff knew Evisions Argos through recommendations from peers at other institutions, and from staff members who had used it at previous stops.
eBug, Emerson’s Enterprise Business User Group, acted as the product search committee. It evaluated Argos and chose it as one of the final four candidates, then recommended to the IT Governance Committee that Argos become the college’s reporting tool. The committee gave its final approval.
Why Argos
Emerson saw Argos as intuitive, with many features focused on the end user. It comes with over 200 pre-built Banner DataBlocks, ranging from graduate and undergraduate courses, enrollment, financial aid and student financial accounts to Degree Works, advancement, compliance reports and more.
Emerson also valued reputable customer support and a well-established higher ed customer community, with a CO-OP of reusable DataBlocks, dashboards and report templates. OLAP cubes give executives quick statistical and analytical insight, process utilities can update data in Banner or other source systems, and automated email can be data-triggered.
“Overall, the transition to Argos was a smooth one, as the platform is very intuitive and user-friendly in comparison to our previous BI tool.”
Director · Academic Advising
| Before | With Argos |
|---|---|
| A BI tool many end users did not find intuitive | An intuitive tool with many features focused on the end user |
| Similar reports replicated across departmental silos | Departments run all their reports without replication or silos |
| No shared reporting standards | A library standardizing parameters, values, colors and themes |
| Manual processes | Argos reports with diversified parameters and scheduling |
“
It is now rare that we get data requests that cannot be fulfilled with a premade Argos report.
College Registrar · Emerson College
03
The results
Fewer copies, cleaner data, faster answers
Since implementing Argos, Emerson College has been able to meet the reporting objectives it set out to achieve.
One central repository
Reporting data is more accessible and more consistent.
Summary to detail
Comprehensive analysis, with fewer data inaccuracies and faster turnaround on complex reports.
Dashboards in a single view
Advanced visualization of comprehensive data sets on one screen.
Autonomy for end users
People run their own reports without needing technical knowledge.
Redundancy removed
Similar reports consolidated, with no departmental silos.
Simpler security
Report user security management is simpler.
Over 80 users received report training in preparation for the production rollout. Deploying Argos campus wide has also let the college clean up and verify the accuracy of its data.
“
Instead of seeing only one report that was set up for me, I can now see a slew of reports. This gives me a better sense of what’s possible. Together, with IT, we have set up new reports which evolved out of our collaboration during the transition.
Commencement Director
Emerson College
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