Customer story · Missouri State University
Empowering staff and informing the campus community with Argos
Missouri State paired the Banner Operational Data Store with Argos to give faculty and staff secure, self-service reporting, and rolled it out campus wide in less than a year.
Springfield, Missouri
Public, 4-year university
Argos
- Campus-wide access, made easyGranting reporting access across campus is easy with unlimited user licenses.
- For beginners and expertsBasic users rely on the visual designer; experienced users add their own SQL.
- Sensitive data, fine-tunedArgos security fine-tunes who can see sensitive information.
Missouri State University at a glance
1905
Founded
22,000+
Students
2,000+
Faculty and staff
150+
Undergraduate programs
45+
Graduate programs
01
The challenge
Reports for everyone, without exposing what is sensitive
Missouri State University needed to make it easier for its faculty and staff to generate operational and ad hoc reports.
Self-service reporting
Faculty and staff needed an easier way to produce operational and ad hoc reports.
Sensitive data
Some reports contained sensitive data, making information security a major concern.
Answers at every level
Dashboards and summary reports had to reach individuals at all levels, quickly.
Because some of these reports contained sensitive data, information security was a major concern. The university also wanted a comprehensive set of tools that could generate dashboards and other summary reports to quickly provide information to individuals at all levels, goals its existing reporting tool could not meet.
02
The solution
The ODS underneath, Argos across campus
The Banner Operational Data Store (ODS) and Argos by Evisions provide the answer to Missouri State’s reporting requirements.
The ODS provides a dataset that is easier and more efficient to query than the production tables, and reporting from it prevents the response-time issues long-running queries can cause in production. It offers enterprise-wide data for operational and ad hoc reporting with a consistent view of institutional data, lets more people be designers, and supports Online Analytical Processing (OLAP). For these reasons, Missouri State uses the ODS as its primary query and reporting source.
To maximize the return on that investment, Missouri State partnered with Evisions and purchased Argos in April 2008. In less than a year, Argos was rolled out campus wide; because it is web based, the roll-out was relatively straightforward.
Simple for some, powerful for others
With unlimited Argos user licenses, Missouri State has been able to distribute and take full advantage of the ODS. Staff like the English field names in the ODS and Argos’ ability to add aliases, and calculations and flags such as GPA and Registered (Y/N) are easier to find. Basic users find the visual designer helpful for simple queries, while experienced users add more sophisticated SQL for complex reports.
Departments use Argos for unofficial transcripts for faculty advisors, IPEDS reporting, YTD financial summaries, reports in Finance, HR, Student Information, and IR, automated Financial Aid reporting such as spring packaging and student loan reports, and Argos OLAP to present census data instead of static PDF files.
Missouri State uses public and private folders for development and production, and takes advantage of Argos security to fine-tune access to sensitive information. The university developed its own training classes and also uses Evisions’ live and recorded Argos trainings.
“
We needed to improve our ability to produce ad hoc reports including dashboards for decision-makers. We wanted to empower our staff to easily generate any report that they needed to service our university and students.
Theresa McCoy · Coordinator of Management Information Systems, Missouri State University
03
The results
Over 300 reports and more than a thousand viewers
Argos has been very well received by the Missouri State University community. Since roll-out, the university has developed over 300 production reports and trained users at every level.
300+ production reports
Developed since the campus-wide roll-out.
70+ DataBlock Designers
Trained to build the data sources reports draw on.
156+ Report Writers
Trained to write reports in Argos.
1,000+ viewers
Faculty and staff with access to the reports they need.
The users and technical team are happy with Argos and the things they can do with it.
“
Argos has made it easier to provide information to the campus community.
Katherine Coy
Director of Institutional Research
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