Starting a Business Intelligence Initiative on a Budget Using Microsoft

Presentation Summary

Miriam Clark, Kansas State University

This is the story of a startup. It’s a story about change and acceptance. Like many universities Kansas State is facing the challenges of budget reduction with higher expectations of supporting our students and increasing retention and graduation rates. In order to meet the challenges facing us, we need to move to data driven decision making. Our current culture is based on reporting from transactional systems where much of the information is difficult to access. We need increased transparency into our business and academic data across multiple subject areas and faster more agile reporting in order to be a more effective organization. We need analytical tools to enable data driven decision making. This presentation will discuss our implementation of Microsoft as our business intelligence toolset and our roadmap to implementation. We built a data warehouse for Pre-Awards Research and plan to use SharePoint as our presentation environment. We will describe our history, the challenges we had to overcome and are still currently overcoming, what we built and how, how many people use it, how much data is in it, and our training and communication plans. Also covered will be our short and long term plans, timelines, use cases and the order that we plan to implement the various subject areas.