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llllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll 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. Why Continuing Education Units Need Business Intelligence 1 llllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll 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 2 Why Continuing Education Units Need Business Intelligence llllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll 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: Why Continuing Education Units Need Business Intelligence 3 llllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll 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. 4 Why Continuing Education Units Need Business Intelligence