In my last entry, I discussed the data warehouse’s role in the digital dashboard for Higher Education. In parallel to the data warehousing technology, Business Intelligence (BI) is a system of reports, metrics and dashboards designed to drive decisions that optimize an organization’s performance. Reports, scorecards and digital dashboards are some BI applications that could be designed using data warehousing technology. Business Intelligence components reside on the data warehousing platform to enable end users to access them more efficiently.

BI performance management software for Higher Education enables you to:
• Calculate curriculum costs
• Identify good fundraising programs and sources (e.g., Alumni)
• Monitor student headcount and performance, program outcomes, school reputation, national agendas and other KPIs
• Share secure Web-based information with all stakeholders
• Manage endowments and recruitment through driver-based planning
• Spot high- and low-performance schools or programs
• Map enrollment to attendance and attendance to performance
• Speed compliance reporting

I’ll wrap up with my conclusions regarding the digital dashboard for Higher Education in my next entry.

The City University of New York (CUNY) is a GREEN leader of huge proportions! I listened in on a very energizing Webinar yesterday that consisted of a discussion – moderated by a representative of the Center for Digital Education – with Ron Spalter, Executive Director for the CUNY Task Force on Sustainability, and Tria Case, CUNY University Director of Sustainability.

CUNY enrolls 400,000 students and, with all of its 10,000 faculty members and employees included, has about 500,000 people moving through the campuses of its 23 colleges in New York City every day. CUNY occupies 29 million square feet of real estate and consumes 1% of the city’s entire energy load. The system is huge and, right now, it is embarking on changes that will make a huge impact on the environment. The goal is to reduce the institution’s carbon footprint by 30% by 2017.

From an IT perspective, CUNY is changing out all legacy systems and deploying Oracle/PeopleSoft as its base for gaining efficiencies and reducing energy usage. But that is only a small part of the plan. It’s comprehensive, with high participation across all campuses. From the sound of it, the initiative is extremely well orchestrated and no stone has been left unturned.

Check out the CUNY Web site to learn more. You may also be interested in checking out their October 30, 2008, Sustainability Conference. CUNY is committed to minimizing its ecological impact and investing the resources to “construct, retrofit and maintain more sustainable facilities,” and they want to share ideas to ensure success. In addition to the October 30 conference, CUNY is forming an advisory board consisting of a broad spectrum of industry leaders from financial services and utility companies, as well as the “new green industry.”

We’re impressed with this undertaking and wish CUNY the highest degree of success. The road to sustainability will certainly require a sustained effort, and it sounds like they have put the foundation in place to move their enormous and highly complex institution successfully along the path toward their vision. GO CUNY!

Data warehouse and Business Intelligence go hand-in-hand with the design requirements of a digital dashboard for Higher Education. The data warehouse provides a platform to store campus-wide information from multiple operational datamarts. In this entry, I’ll discuss the role of the data warehouse in developing the digital dashboard for Higher Education. In my next entry, I’ll cover how to improve performance using Business Intelligence.

Executives at Higher Education institutions are increasingly in need of timely and accurate information to make critical business decisions, assess risks against benchmarks and respond quickly to market changes. Like growing commercial industries, Higher Education is in need of accurate, timely and relevant information on which to base decisions, not only for long-term planning, but also to address day-to-day developments. In order to store vast amounts of historical data electronically and to facilitate reporting and analysis work, Higher Education needs to develop the proper data warehousing architecture.

Business Intelligence applications rely on Data Warehouses, as they function as database repositories designed to support a company’s decision-making process. Information populated on digital dashboards are extracted and transformed from Data Warehouses. For bloggers, a digital dashboard is an aggregation of different types of information accessible from a single Web page.

Data warehouses are assuming a more strategic role in making these business decisions, addressing these three challenges:
1.        Delivering near real-time data
2.        Integrating the applications that make the best use of the data
3.        Providing transparent access to systems that contain business-critical data

Solving these challenges typically requires retrieving and analyzing data; extracting, transforming and loading data; and managing the elements of the data dictionary. Data warehouses are optimized for speed of data retrieval, so even for the largest databases, retrieval speed is not a major concern. Multi-dimensional modeling and denormalized data are key factors that contribute to the fast and efficient performance of a data warehouse that directly expedites the data population on a digital dashboard.

Again, I’ll cover the Business Intelligence end of the Data Warehouse/Business Intelligence equation in my next blog entry.

When we ask executives at Higher Education institutions how they assess campus performance, they may share 10 or more key metrics that they track on a regular basis. These key metrics, known as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), are sets of measures that track the effectiveness of a college or university in meeting its mission, goals and fiduciary responsibilities. KPIs represent the “vital signs” of the college’s performance against a predefined benchmark. They form a balanced scorecard that should give a strong indication of the institution’s health and progress. KPIs are always associated with a list of measures that scales the school’s performance. Thus, KPIs are directly derived from key focus areas that align with the institution’s vision and mission, and they aid it in achieving its goals.

Accordingly, development of a set of Key Performance Indicators should follow these guidelines:
• Do not confuse the number of indicators with their usefulness in decision-making. A greater number of indicators does not necessarily result in more or better information.
• Address issues of validity and reliability when creating indicators. Do they actually measure what you intend them to? Should you compare the results to those of other institutions and systems? If so, can you qualify your comparisons by identifying institutions and systems that are comparable in vision, mission and experience with assessment?
• Be sure to clarify how the indicators will be used. Recognize the different purposes inherent in public accountability and institutional improvement agendas.
• Develop performance indicators that represent all aspects of the institution.
• Use a variety of methods, both qualitative and quantitative, to capture, analyze and report your findings.
• Link performance indicators to institutional processes to improve performance and inform decision-making.
• Communicate clearly with all relevant constituencies – internal and external – concerning the goals, development, and reporting of data related to performance indicators.
• Ensure that all stakeholders are included in and participate in the development process

In my next entry, I’ll explain a little about the data warehouse’s role in the digital dashboard for Higher Education.

Here are some of the major benefits a digital dashboard for Higher Education provides:
• Enables administrators and campus executives to better support the education process by accurately compiling, analyzing and reporting information across systems to both internal and external decision-makers
• Empowers faculty with the information they need to create the best learning environment for all students
• Provides the right information at the right time to the right user group
• Maximizes the availability of information to all levels of the organization: the Executive level receives performance data, the Management level receives trend and summary data, and the Staff level receives detailed data
• Facilitates seamless processes supporting the full life cycle of student administration
• Enables campus executives and administrators to track and monitor campus key performance indicators in order to establish, improve and align them with the mission

I have mentioned Key Performance Indicators in a couple of my blog entries. I will discuss these further in my next entry.

Like other industries, Higher Education has adopted and accepted the digital dashboard, a Business Intelligence system, to manage the information of day-to-day operations related to recruiting, enrollments, student information, finance, etc., that drives institutional excellence. A major challenge for Higher Education is to manage the continued expansion of campus information in an analytical way in order to gain insights at the aggregate level. Business Intelligence plays an essential role in developing strategies for institutional effectiveness.

Digital dashboards highlight department- or institution-wide performance and trends against goals for recruiting and admissions, enrollment, financial aid, student billing, student retention and more. By having a clear understanding of the strategic impacts of their decisions and assumptions, campus executives can be more nimble in their decision-making. In summary, Business Intelligence is all about getting the critical performance information that the campus executives need, when they need it, in a form that’s easy to understand and deliver to all consumer levels.

Higher Education uses Business Intelligence to gain key insights that can dramatically improve college/university performance. These solutions provide key metrics and information, tailored to the needs of executives, that measure the performance of an institution and facilitate strategic vision and planning. Campus Executives use Key Performance Indicators to manage and monitor overall campus performance. Dashboard, Scorecard and Reports are some of the BI technologies being used to manage, monitor and view the Key Performance Indicators.

For my next blog entry, I thought it would be helpful to bullet point some benefits of the digital dashboard for Higher Education.

“Why do I need a dashboard? I’m a college department head, not a cab driver!” This is the common response that I receive every time I bring up the topic of the digital dashboard. However, I’m not talking about an automobile dashboard, of course, but a digital dashboard for Higher Education.

A digital dashboard is a Business Intelligence system designed along the lines of an automobile dashboard display system. However, digital dashboard is enhanced with sophisticated features that display real-time data in a more interactive and presentable way with color-coded visual effects – graphical representations of gauges and depictions that summarize institutional performance. While an automobile dashboard displays a speedometer, fuel gauge, temperature gauge, etc., the digital dashboard displays a Higher Education institution’s performance indicators with multiple gauges—in this case Key Performance Indicators, such as Retention Rate, Enrollment, Student Graduation Rate, Transfer Rate, etc. Much as a driver does with the automobile, college and university executives take appropriate actions based on alerts provided by the indicators.

In my next entry, I will share some thoughts on the digital dashboard as a Business Intelligence tool.

There are some things you can do to protect your applications investments. See Oracle’s presentation  for a complete listing. But, I can tell you that one thing stands out. You should upgrade to the minimum release required to allow direct migration to Fusion Applications.

This means that the following releases are recommended:

1. E-Business Suite 11i.10, R12 and beyond
2. PeopleSoft Enterprise 8.8, 8.9, 9.0 and beyond
3. JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 8.11, 8.12 and beyond
4. JD Edwards World A7.3, A8.1, A9.1 and beyond
5. Siebel 8.0 and beyond

Being on these releases will not only ensure that you are capable of upgrading to Fusion Applications in the future, but it will also enable you to take advantage of new products that are continuously being certified against these versions.

As I mentioned earlier, Oracle’s Applications Unlimited strategy complements the Fusion Applications. This means that you can conceivably stay on your current ERP platform without having to upgrade to Fusion Applications. Oracle categorizes three stages of lifetime support for Applications Unlimited. I will summarize the features and benefits of each, as described by Oracle on their site (http://www.oracle.com/support/lifetime-support-policy.html), and then explain why I do not recommend allowing your organization to remain at the third level of support.

1) Premier Support – provides you with maintenance and support of your Oracle Database, Oracle Fusion Middleware, and Oracle Applications for five years from their general availability date.

2) Extended Support – allows you stay competitive, with the freedom to upgrade on your own timetable. It provides you with an extra three years of support for specific Oracle releases for an additional fee. You benefit from the same quality of service you receive with Premier Support, with the security of knowing you can expand your systems when the time is right.

3) Sustaining Support – puts you in control of your upgrade strategy. With Sustaining Support, you will receive technical support for as long as you operate your systems – which includes access to Oracle’s online support tools, knowledgebases, pre-existing fixes for your solution, and assistance from technical experts.

My recommendation is not to remain in the Sustaining Support mode, because no new bugs will be accepted at this level. This negates your ability to be in control of your upgrade strategy based on business requirements, because, should a new issue arise, the standard advice will be to upgrade.

In my next entry, I will provide practical recommendations about what you should do about all of this now.

To facilitate the best of breed approach to Fusion Applications, Oracle consolidates the foundation components for each of the products in its portfolio (E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and Siebel) in the suite’s technology stack.

Oracle has been doing this in a 2-step process. At one level, it is pulling more products under the Fusion Middleware umbrella. Fusion Middleware has expanded from a Web server to a rich suite of products including Application Server, Identity management, Security, Business Intelligence and Application Integration Architecture.

At the next level, Oracle has been upgrading the technology stack of the application products in the portfolio so that as many products from the Fusion Middleware suite can be utilized as possible.

For example, XML Publisher, the reporting framework from the Fusion Middleware Suite of products, has been certified to work with PeopleSoft 8.48 and is seamlessly integrated with version 9.0. This means when customers use PeopleSoft version 9.0, they are ready for Fusion Applications.

The same approach is used for several of the products in Fusion Middleware suite, such as Single Sign-on solutions, and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (Formerly Siebel Analytics), which has been certified to work with E-Business suite.

The Fusion Applications will work on the same set of Fusion Middleware components. So you can protect your investment and reduce some upgrade-related headaches in the future by ensuring that your environment is running at least at the minimum level required to take advantage of the direct upgrade path to Fusion Applications.

In my next entry, I will discuss the available support options for Oracle Fusion.