The Power of Transparency: Enabling Easy Access to Higher Education Analytics

Like many industries, higher education is experiencing aggressive digital transformation. Historically, outreach to previous, current and prospective students was conducted through in person or telephonic conversations. Today, communication from colleges and universities is mostly digital, through channels such as student online portals and social media. This is particularly important for prospective students, who demand online communication options.

A 30+ year old strategic enrollment management (SEM) company is a leading provider of solutions and services for enrollment, student success and fundraising for higher education and nonprofit communities across the globe. They are one of many organizations in the industry who has spent years planning and executing a digital transformation to adapt to changing industry needs. They committed to deliver a new, robust and highly efficient online portal for their client base of more than 1200 higher education institutions, providing them a 360-degree view of student data at any point in the student’s journey.

After 3+ years of development, the infrastructure that had been implemented was costly, inefficient and still not meeting the customer’s overall objective.

Following a renewed directive by the CEO, they embarked on an operational data transformation initiative to update their antiquated and costly operational data processes critical to their business of servicing higher education. Their key objective was to effectively create a data marketplace for higher education institutions, enabling them to easily view student data and easily access analytic results through intuitive, interactive dashboards.

Deliverables to further this objective included:

• Implementing internal and external data glossary standards to enforce a common understanding and quality of information for both internal organizational definitions and for the higher education industry as a whole.
• Consolidating multiple tools to reduce internal and external reporting costs
• Ensuring efficient end-to-end client file capture, data cleansing, transformation and data delivery (reporting) that enable:
  • Improvement of current data processing performance
  • Architecture support of ongoing data and advanced analytics growth
  • Accurate and more meaningful higher education analytics and insights

Read how this strategic enrollment management used higher education analytics and established an enterprise data governance program with a standardized, central business glossary and provided visibility into data asset location, usage and processes.