Leading educational institutions use Cognos for data-driven decision making

As a result of increased competitions, institutions offering higher education need to transform their data into valuable information that can drive better decisions. Through a more sophisticated view of their performance, Cognos enables universities uncover and improve the performance of fundraising programmes, identify and recruit the most desirable students, improve graduation rates by tracking individual student performance across courses and disciplines, and increase tuition revenue and profitability through more informed management of curriculum and course offerings.

"Educational institutions are under considerable pressure to find innovative ways to strengthen competitive advantage and improve services they deliver to students. They can achieve these goals through the more effective use of business information locked up in their operational systems,"

says David Brierley, regional manager, Cognos Middle East and Africa. "Cognos performance management solutions allow educational institutions effectively leverage information to help allocate resources for maximum impact, assess and monitor performance of students, staff, and curriculum, and maintain fiscal responsibility."

The University of Texas at Austin, USA, faced significant financial constraints due to budget limitations and funding challenges. By turning to Cognos business intelligence (BI), university administrators gained the information they needed to optimise their financial resources. For instance, the university can now easily analyse how much business it has conducted by vendor, and whether those amounts are trending up or down over the years, allowing the school to negotiate better prices. Cognos has also streamlined financial reporting, helping save 700 person hours in compiling the university's 2005 annual report.

On the academic side, Cognos has helped the university better manage its curriculum offerings, tracking trends in course enrollment, analyzing the relationship between curriculum and revenue, and identifying the classroom factors that lead to improved performance.

"The key to our future success was having better information so we could make the right decisions. More often than not, it took people several weeks of sifting through spreadsheets and reports to find what they wanted - whether it was the dean of liberal arts trying to figure out how many teaching assistants he needed, or the financial dean of the law school figuring out how much free balance she had available in multiple investment accounts," says Fred Friedrich, associate vice president and controller of financial affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. "With Cognos, the ultimate goal is to provide a single version of the truth that enables quicker, more efficient and more accurate decision-making."

"Business intelligence (BI) is critical to an organisation's decision-making and Cognos solutions make sharing answers and insights across business effortless so stakeholders can make informed decisions, turn strategy into action, and optimise corporate performance," adds Brierley.