Higher Education and BI Implementation Challenges
Higher education is a level post completion of school, and encompasses but not limited to universities, colleges, professional certifications and vocational courses.Higher education industry is unique and often cannot be assessed with conventional marketplace theories. This uniqueness stems from expectations on education like solving socio-economic problems, political demand to expand its reach while reducing financial burden on students, to try and be 'non-profit' and also to be the foundation of a nation's growth. In recent times we see this complex and diverse industry having entrants from 'for profit' institutions who have increased the competition to attract the best feed in terms of students and academia alike, to obtain grants from corporate and government bodies and are in search of enablers to cut cost and increase their revenue.
No wonder, like successful business entities elsewhere, growing educational institutions have realized the potential of IT to help them reach their strategic goals. Of the various IT applications and solutions, business intelligence apps have come out as a clear differentiator as is evident from the growing popularity of BI Hi-Ed solutions being offered by product market leaders.
Though opportunities are abound, there are certain challenges distinct to this industry which needs to be overcome for a successful BI implementation in our colleges! Have listed 3 key aspects below:
Choosing the Right Metrics: Conventional BI architects rely on hard metrics like Financial Ratios, Employee churn, ones around customer loyalty or supplier performance to measure a business' performance but they may not bring out the true health of an educational enterprise. To gauge the success of a teaching activity, one need to capture softer metrics around Admissions, Campus Events, Academic Plans so on and so forth. This data, in conjunction with Grants, Awards and Financial aid information, needs to be modeled as complex metrics to enable accurate decision making to enhance education processes.
Aged IT infrastructure: Leaving aside a few elite Universities/Schools, BI infrastructure and applications are at a very nascent state at most of these places. Due to absence of a clear IT strategy, there are myriad, though small, transactional applications built to map the business processes. These have been there for a long time and have been enhanced without proper checks and controls. So when there's a need to have a consolidated 'one context of truth', it becomes a huge challenge to extract and fuse data from various silos which got historically dumped in without any standards, guidelines or proper processes. This is a pitfall which may give rise to meaningless intelligence if not correctly and cautiously assessed, analyzed and acted upon.
User immaturity: University BI strategy is formulized by a handful of users who are typically from 'old schools of thought'. These power users rely on 'spread-marts' and lack the vision to have a standardized view of information. They have enormous control on the reporting needs of the enterprise and are often satisfied with 'what happened'/'why did it happen' type of insight not bothering much to exploit data to optimize performance leave alone decision automation. Their lack of vision often is a deterrent for BI service providers to implement upscale BI utilities.
Will keep this post open and like to hear from the readers any other challenges you have encountered during BI/BPM implementations in higher educational institutions.
Comments
Higher education institutes want to adopt practices and styles of working which will enable them to promote their image of being a non-profit oragnization and be seen as working for the betterment of the society. For them nurturing this image is very important even if it means spending more money or doing things less efficiently.
Offshoring of late has taken a negative connotation in coutries like the US where it is seen as something that is taking away jobs from citizens and moving them to low cost countries. Higher education institutes therefore will tread on this very carefully. The way to go with them is be less pushy, build good relations with key stakeholders and try to address their needs as and when they arise. The focus has to be less on the idea of offshoring (in fact much less) and more or adding value to what they want to achieve.
Higer Eds want people to be provided at very short notices and expect their IT partners to comply. Prior experience in other Educational institutions, especially the top ones, is of significant help. Educational institutions, unlike commercial corporations, share ideas and experiences among themselves a lot. They want to adopt the best practices that are prevalant. This acts as a double edged sword. News and feedback on good work or bad work done at one institution travels very fast and has significant bearing on prospects of getting addtional work in this sector.
Posted by: Shantanu Bagchi | July 15, 2010 7:04 AM