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special report
Why Continuing Education Units
Need Business Intelligence
By Greg Marsello, Vice President for Organizational Development, LERN
Business Intelligence
Business intelligence, or BI, is an umbrella term that refers to a variety of
software applications used to analyze a business’ data. BI as a discipline is
made up of several related activities, including data mining, online analytical
processing, querying and reporting.
“Making data-driven decisions” is one of the seven reasons why continuing
education units win. Any continuing education unit ranked in the top 25
percent of continuing education units collects, analyzes and renders decisions
based on data. The primary data areas in continuing education are;
•student registration data (each individual student registration including
demographics of student registering),
•course/class data (each individual class offered assigned to a category
and subcategory with cost information),
•promotion data (each individual registration tied to a promotion
method), and
•contract sales data (each individual contract sold assigned to a client
with cost information).
Dedication to BI:
Based on LERN’s research, below are six key indicators which show a
continuing education unit is dedicated to BI:
1. Shares information efficiently and effectively.
People across the continuing education unit’s institution share information so
data-driven decisions can be made. BI provides decision-makers and functional
team members the ability to access and analyze up-to-date information anytime
and anywhere. Thus everyone throughout the institution can make better
decisions faster.
There are a variety of BI tools
including spreadsheets, reporting
and querying software, online
analytical processing, digital
dashboards, data mining, data
warehousing, decision engineering,
process mining, business
performance management and
local information systems.
Except for spreadsheets, these
tools are sold as; stand-alone
tools, suites of tools, components
of ERP systems (Enterprise
Resource Planning Systems),
or as components of software
targeted to a specific industry, like
continuing education. The tools
are sometimes packaged into data
warehouse appliances.
2. Empowers people.
Provides staff with access to analytical data that is readily available and
understandable, allowing staff to work more efficiently and effectively which
supports the overall continuing education strategy.
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3. Provides accurate financial and operational information.
Even the continuing education units
who can extract the registration,
programming, promotion and
sales data, still do not have the
tools to analyze the data.
Thus the reason why over the last
fifteen years, LERN has invested
significant resources in building
data analysis tools
• Market Segment/Best Customer
Tool for student registration
data, Program Planner Tool for
course/class data, Promotion
Tracking Tool for promotion
data and Contract Training Tool
for contract sales data.
• These tools are available for
LERN members to use as part
of LERN Membership and/or
by asking LERN to use these
tools to analyze your continuing
education unit’s data.
Simplifies collaboration, sharing and improves staff alignment when using a
single source for financial and operational reporting. Having a single, central
location allows a continuing education unit to monitor key performance
indicators, access reports, analyze data, and share documents. All of the
functional areas are aligned to articulate strategies, set objectives, and monitor
the continuing education unit’s performance so staff can make better-informed
and timely decisions supporting the overall strategy.
4. Stronger strategic and tactical decisions are made.
Gains insight and understands analyzes the continuing education unit’s
performance and opportunities on a deeper level. Analyzes and evaluates
information that is more accessible and easy to interact with to make strategic
and tactical decisions.
5. Delivers meaningful analysis and reporting.
Readily track and analyze key performance indicators against key business
goals to gain a better understanding of how the continuing education unit is
performing today and not when it’s too late to impact performance.
6. Scalable and flexible software solution.
The unit’s software solution can easily grow and change with the continuing
education and the every changing lifelong learning community.
Continuing Education Units & BI
Most continuing education units can collect data, however we find units
continue to have difficulty analyzing the data needed to provide backup for
decision-making. Continuing education units operating on ERPs such as
Banner®, Datatel® and PeopleSoft® report having a much more difficult time
getting the data they need – or at least getting it in a timely fashion – while
continuing education units operating on industry specific software systems,
such as Augusoft Lumens®, endorsed by LERN, can more easily manage the
collection and extraction of their continuing education data.
As continuing education data analysis has matured, the following three
continuing education BI tools/functionality have emerged.
1. Data collection and analysis.
As outlined above continuing education units are collecting the right student
registration, course/class programming, promotion and/or contract sales data
and analyzing the data using LERN’s data analysis tools (over 200 continuing
education units each year have LERN analyze their student registration data)
or their own data analysis tools to make data-driven decisions.
2. Dashboards.
Lumens provides a glance view Dashboard made up of key performance
indicators relevant to a particular objective or business process such as;
registration, most popular classes, and promotion methods. Dashboards
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Augusoft Lumens® Dashboards. Copyright 2014
provide the viewer an immediate display in real-time indicating whether
something is wrong or right. Dashboards are typically limited to show
summaries, key trends, comparisons, and exceptions.
By collecting and analyzing
data, a continuing education
unit can understand their open
enrollment and client repeat
rate; primary carrier routes and
Postal Codes; best performing
categories, subcategories,
courses, classes and class-types;
best ROI promotion method;
best customers and clients;
and so on. With increased BI a
continuing education unit can
now make decisions with data
which support decisions to;
increase or decrease certain
promotion methods, cut certain
courses, increase/decrease
greater saturation of particular
carrier routes or Postal Codes,
and/or determine for what client
types one should develop new
products and services.
3. Report generation and distribution.
There are certain reports a continuing education unit should generate.
Examples are; go/no-go report (daily), refunds (weekly), revenue by category
and subcategory (monthly), review of a quarter/term of data (quarterly).
These reports should be forwarded to specific continuing education staff and/
or institution employees, such as Business Office staff. Reporting must be
flexible enough to allow for editing, custom report generation, standard report
generation or fulfill a special request report that can be exportable in a variety
of reporting methods such as Excel, CSV and PDF.
BI by 2020
At the very least, the software system a continuing education unit is using
must allow staff to collect and analyze data, get an immediate snapshot
picture of key performance indicators and generate scheduled or nonscheduled reports. However, by the year 2020, winning continuing education
units will need to be even more BI sophisticated. As technology improves and
the need to drive growth and improve productive increases based on increased
information data, the following BI shifts will need to be incorporated by
continuing education units:
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1. Mobile BI.
Conclusion
For over 25 years, LERN has
pushed continuing education units
to become more data-driven.
Many of the successful continuing
education units have taken the
challenge and worked hard
collecting the right data to make
tactical and strategic decisions
based on data. At the same time,
LERN’s strategic relationship with
Augusoft and industry research has
guided Lumens BI functionality
to support today’s continuing
education units need for BI data
collection, data analysis, report
generation, dashboard functionality
and customer relationship
functionality. Together with the
lifelong learning community,
LERN and Augusoft will work
to continuously improve Lumens
to ensure continuing education
units using Lumens are prepared
for the needs of a “winning 2020
continuing education unit”.
The ability for students, staff and clients to access information any time, in
any location, and on a hand-held device. Continuing education units and their
customers and clients will need to take advantage of the mobile platform to
deliver and present targeted information in a concise, relevant and user-friendly
way leveraging interactive and visual capabilities.
2. BI in the cloud.
By 2020 the term “cloud” will have disappeared from the phrase “cloud
computing” because the majority of computing will simply be done in the
cloud. Thus continuing education units will have shifted from stand-alone
products to enterprise services that make BI pervasive and easier to use.
3. Social intelligence.
With the increase of social media business strategies, an integration of social
media utilizing inbound and outbound marketing will be required to gain
competitive insight. The importance of having an all-encompassing customer
relationship management tool, such as Augusoft Lumens Connect powered by
Genoo® will be a must.
4. Data everywhere.
The increased data velocity and volume will make it more challenging to
exploit the value of data for decision-making. A continuing education unit
must be clear about what data is or is not important, thus what are the key
benchmarks being used to guide decision-making.
5. Information management.
Continuing education units will no longer be able to depend on Excel
spreadsheets, but must operate on a software system’s ability to gather and
report on data needed to operate the continuing education unit successfully.
Thus all data gathered must be collected in the continuing education unit’s
software system and the data analysis tools must be integrated into the
software system.
6. Answers.
As BI functionality improves, BI tools used will do more than provide data
analysis, they will suggest actions. Thus a continuing education unit will be
provided their cancellation rate, but due to the data selected the continuing
education staff will receive recommendations on actions the unit can take to
reduce the cancellation rate.
7. Everyone will have BI.
Presently the majority of BI is housed with institution IT staff determining
what data analysis to generate and report on. By 2020, everyone will have
access to the information they need to make decisions. Individual staff will
have a real-time dashboard of information they need to manage and guide
their area of responsibility.
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Why Continuing Education Units Need Business Intelligence