Developing and Supporting Analytics Initiatives

Business Intelligence (BI) and analytics initiatives have the potential to serve decision makers and leaders, but many institutions struggle to launch BI programs that are sustainable and affordable. This report provides benchmarks on BI to help the IT function allocate resources and set goals that will make BI a long-term success on campus.

Business Intelligence (BI) and analytics initiatives have the potential to serve decision makers and leaders across the institution, but many institutions struggle to launch BI programs that are sustainable and affordable. The IT Forum has collected benchmarks on BI to help the IT function allocate resources and set goals that will make BI a long-term success on campus. This report provides insights and statistics on BI initiatives of colleges and universities across the United States and Canada. Members can use the data to benchmark their BI strategy, plan, and operations against those of other organizations. See our key findings below. 1. BI struggles without data governance Invest in tactics to standardize definitions, align processes, and centralize data access to build a sustainable BI initiative. Data governance contributes to transparency, confidence, consistency, and security; without these critical pieces, BI projects can stall and even fail outright Collaboration with IR on BI is correlated with better data governance, higher BI maturity, and more ROI measurement 2. Consider hiring a dedicated BI leader Full-time BI leaders help build an initiative that is more mature, better-governed, and has stronger buy-in across campus. BI leaders tend to support more collaborative efforts- which leads to more mature efforts with better ROI metrics Dedicated leaders for BI are most common in initiatives with initial investment of at least $500,000, but are associated with maturity and cabinet buy-in across institution types 3. Match BI goals to campus-wide missions Codify BI goals in a single,…