Article of the Month

What are other schools thinking about when developing their BI/Analytics Roadmaps for the next 3-5 years?  Here at Ithaca College, resources to deliver a robust BI environment are becoming scarcer.  The College faces a very competitive demand for high school graduates in the Northeast with declining numbers of prospective high school graduates to choose.  There is more and more institutional need for IT Services in general and the BI slice is becoming compressed.   BI has struggled over the years to maintain the current infrastructure that is a relatively complex, single vendor stack while simultaneously trying to build strategically for the future.  We have spent most of our resources maintaining and have not been as successful at building for the future.  Now acknowledging the scarcer resources and also a changing landscape of new cloud ERPs offering their own analytics solutions and cloud service offerings in general,  we are reimagining our future.   We see new cloud ERPs taking over much of the operational reporting needs that BI has delivered in the past.  This leaves BI/Analytics with a greater emphasis on breaking down ERP silos, data integration and answering institutional strategic questions that provide more value to the College than completing endless upgrades.

We believe we can use cloud services to develop an agile, more vendor agnostic environment and alleviate some of the burden of the existing expensive vendor contracts and the maintenance and overhead the products require.  There are many unanswered questions regarding how exactly to approach this but cloud services seem to be the ideal environment for experimentation and perhaps our BI future.    Please attend the HEDW 2019 Conference to talk about this and many other issues confronting Higher Ed BI/Analytics teams.