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Getting Your Banner Black Belt (Lesson Two): Use Good Requirements Documents
Learning the ropes of Banner reporting can be a challenging process. There is so much data to work with, so many metrics to track, and so many purposes to be served. But even if mastering such a powerful tool can feel impossible at times, I can...
Getting Your Banner Black Belt (Lesson One): Refuse to Become Overwhelmed
Mastering the art of Banner reporting can be easier than you might think! While Banner is a very complex Enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, the first step in understanding its inner workings is to refuse to become overwhelmed by the...
Best Practices for Designing OLAP Cubes
For making complex data-driven decisions, you need a complex data visualization tool. Happily, OLAP (short for On-Line Analytical Processing) is fast becoming a ubiquitous method for the advanced analysis of multi-dimensional information. In Argos,...
A Complete Guide to Understanding IPEDS Reporting
Even as you read this, your institution of higher education is likely in the midst of some element of the IPEDS reporting cycle. With three reporting periods and a growing list of surveys, IPEDS seems to be endless. You know the surveys are...
Addressing Advancement in the Higher Education Industry
People often confuse development, or fundraising, with advancement in the higher education industry. While the actions have many similarities, they are different. Advancement refers to making progress in various avenues related to a university's...
Writing Reports with a Scheduling Mindset
There is an ever-growing need for reports to analyze the mass of data gathered by institutions. Resources to create and execute these reports are limited. An option to reduce the manual component of processing and sending these reports is to use a...
Taking the Enterprise Reporting Philosophy to Higher Education
I think you’ll agree that it’s an understatement to say we have seen considerable technological changes over the last 30 years. The internet, the rise of innovative technology, and the emergence of enterprise reporting systems have swept across the...
How Business Intelligence is Solving Some of the Peskiest Higher Ed Problems
Universities, large and small, private and public, are complex enterprises with issues unique to the education sector. While business intelligence (BI) is a well known option in business, there are specific challenges BI must address to gain deeper...
Five of the Top Metrics Used in Financial Aid
It doesn't matter if it’s a large state university, local community college, or smaller private institution. One of the things all higher education organizations have in common is that they’re all focused on making sure each and every student is...
Addressing the Need of Business Intelligence in Higher Education
Many people are aware of business intelligence (BI) products and how companies can use them to improve productivity to better understand the data behind their operations. However, not everyone realizes the powerful case for using business...
How Top Universities Are Making a Difference Through Fundraising Programs
College is a place for students to learn, laugh, succeed, and fail. Most of all, it’s a place to grow. When colleges and universities provide students with access to the tools they need to succeed, great things can happen. Fundraising...
Top Challenges in HR Reporting at Colleges and Universities
As is the case with most any organization, the most important operational contributor to a higher education institution is its people – its human resources. These people are its value-building machine. But they also make up a large portion of its...
Key Initiatives to Help with Enrollment, Retention, and Student Success
Have you heard any of these questions at your higher education institution? “Is enrollment up versus this time last year? “How well are we doing at retaining that cohort? “How many will graduate, and how many will graduate on time?” Our goal in...
Reporting from Multiple Data Sources in Higher Education: Best Practices
In the age of Big Data and Analytics, we find ourselves surrounded by data. While most of the data might reside in our Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, it’s likely that there are several other ancillary data sources available to us. These...
Steps To Higher Education Data Cleanliness: A Technical Perspective
Introduction As data is collected daily through the heavy use of computers and the internet, we continue to be plagued by the problem of dirty data. Data that is error prone or inconsistent leads to bad outcomes, such as misguided decision making...