University of Central Florida

Education, USA
Focus: dashboard and scorecard functionality in a user-friendly Web environment

With the growing popularity of business intelligence software, the use of SAS at many universities is wandering successfully from research labs to administrative offices.

Now, large amounts of data held in college and university databases can be transformed into meaningful intelligence to help administrators respond to complex educational issues, including resource allocation and student admissions.

At the University of Central Florida (UCF), BI is used to support deans and directors of admissions, marketing, financial aid – and more. Community and government constituents also receive business intelligence from the university to measure and appraise school performance.

Paige Borden, EdD, Director of Institutional Research and University Data Administrator, leads the team responsible for BI at UCF. In 2008, Borden says she’ll be focusing her BI development efforts on scorecards and dashboards. In particular, she is building a portal environment with personalized dashboards and scorecards, predesigned reports and cube data that can be manipulated for individual purposes.

“The leadership team at our university is interested in highlighting our performance against a set of predetermined measures,” says Borden. “Dashboard and scorecard functionality will be used to provide attractive, graphical views in an easy-to-use Web portal environment.”

Those dashboards will also help Borden overcome a common challenge: “Although Institutional Research has an enormous amount of Web-presented data, there is a perceived lack of information availability by the strategic decision makers,” she explains. “By focusing on dashboard and scorecard applications, we will demonstrate to the leadership team that information is available and has strategic value.”