Colorado State University Moves Enterprise Analytics to the Cloud with ibi^™

Located in Fort Collins, at the base of the Rocky Mountains, Colorado State University (CSU) is a large, public, research-intensive university that – consistent with its land-grant heritage – offers a comprehensive array of undergraduate and graduate programs through eight individual colleges. By statute, there are also four state agencies assigned to CSU: the Colorado Agricultural Experiment Station, Extension, the Colorado State Forest Service, and the Colorado Water Center.

Outcomes

Since going live with ibi Cloud, the university has created a centralized analytics platform that consolidates more than 15,000 financial reports from multiple data sources, departments, and reporting environments. The Office of Institutional Research, Planning and Effectiveness developed an externally facing dashboard that prospective students and their parents can use to get to know the various departments and majors at the university. A portal built on the ibi analytics platform includes self-service applications targeted to specific domains, such as student enrollment, degrees conferred, entering freshman characteristics, and student success.

Challenges

Data and analytics drive many academic initiatives, and data is also critical to the many back-office administrative functions that keep the university running smoothly, from finance to human resources (HR), admissions to institutional research. Campus constituents wanted a cloud-based solution that could improve student outcomes through predictive analytics, boost operational efficiencies, and differentiate CSU from other institutions with externally facing dashboards and fact books. 

Solutions

With the support of the vice president for Information Technology (IT) and dean of Libraries, CSU’s Information Services (IS) department led the effort to select one enterprise platform that could fulfill the analytics needs of the entire university. In a related effort, a small team of people from across the university migrated key HR, finance, and student reports to the new analytics environment, based on a database schema that enables business users to query and visualize the data through InfoAssist, part of the ibi analytics.

Benefits

The Student Success self-service applications allows administrators to study student success in terms of retention, graduation rates, and attrition. Users can see how students are persisting year to year, as well as monitor how long it takes for students to graduate, broken down by various filters and sorting variables, so the university can better allocate its resources.

The Degrees self-service applications shows degrees conferred by year, gender, ethnicity, and degree category, sorted by college, gender, ethnicity, and other variables. The innovation continues, anchored by the variety of software tools available in ibi Cloud. For example, the Admissions department is exploring the use of ibi analytics platform’s predictive models that will help them monitor fall enrollment numbers week by week, as well as indicate which types of students are most likely to enroll, based on data in their applications.