Education

A smarter planet with IBM Cognos Analytics for education

Institutions are under increasing pressure to continue to advance student and staff successes with continued budget pressures, and stringent compliance and transparency requirements.

Achieving this success without trusted information to drive optimal decisions makes the business of managing education a challenge.

Many institutions are faced with organisational data silos and a lack of a singular view of performance and accountability. By applying IBM Business Analytics, many higher-education institutions have torn down those silos and achieved a complete view of students, programs and budgets. They now have an alignment with institutional strategy and execution and can:

identify and accelerate the recruitment of the right students to achieve their institutional goals
enhance university advancement and alumni management capability and beyond
improve student performance and retention
improve operational efficiencies.

IBM Business Analytic software for Education provides an integrated platform for educational performance management. It leverages all of your institution’s critical data and delivers information through intelligent reporting and interactive analysis to understand:

historical performance
scorecards
proactive alerts to monitor key metrics
predictive analytics to better anticipate what is likely to happen
budgeting and planning solutions to optimize performance accountability and drive future excellence.

Analytics for Higher Education
Online Demo [35MB]
Learn how many higher education institutions are achieving a complete view of student performance, programs and budgets, while improving operational efficiencies.

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Smarts = Advantage

The Cortell team brings the smarts to your IBM Cognos Education Analytics initiative, giving your institution a competitive advantage. We will help you expand your analytical capabilities throughout the student lifecycle and beyond.

Cortell helps leading education institutions significantly improve their ability to:

reduce preparation time of annual budgets and medium term financial plans
provide accurate semesterly forecasting, variation to budget analysis, cost analysis and management of expenses
to have one version of truth
have one set of reports /data entry sheets for easier integration
what-if and sensitivity analysis
remove manual and labour intensive processes when managing the student load forecasting, cost management and consequential financial implications
drive better decision making, strategy and improvement within the Faculty.

From a Budgeting, Forecasting and Planning perspective, we will help you:

develop long-range plans, forecasts and budgets across the institution
gain consensus, and consolidate top-down and bottom-up operational plans with financial plans
increase accountability across the institution through a high-participation planning process
support timely updates of forecasts
confidently track spending against limits and link that spending to targeted outcomes.

We will help you implement IBM Cognos dashboards and scorecards so that you can:

aggregate operational data from multiple silos and across the institution
measure performance against strategic initiatives
gain a high-level overview of performance across key areas of the institution
monitor operations by specific metrics
use insight for action, such as for preventing high-risk student drop-out
track financial goals in terms of growth, profitability and expenses.

We will help you consolidate your data and turn it into meaningful information with IBM Cognos Reporting and analysis to:

demonstrate good governance, transparency and accountability
identify the processes and operations that generate unfavorable variances
monitor important KPIs and report on compliance
easily query data to track trends, understand results and create customised reports. Track individual students or groups of students from year-to-year to determine how their performance changes over time.

We will introduce IBM SPSS Predictive Analytics to your business, giving you the ability to:

integrate statistical analysis, data and text mining and survey research instruction into the classroom
recruit the right students
prevent attrition
further student success
conduct institutional planning and assessment
save money and maximise resources
analyse text gathered from social media sources, including Twitter, Facebook, blogs, wikis and RSS feeds. The solution detects the context of the words used, understands emoticons, slang and other social media terminology, as well as terminology specific to your the education industry.

Additional areas the Cortell team are able to assist your institution:

student load forecasting
research funding analysis
resource & campus capacity planning
workforce management
course costing
academic analytics
procurement planning
price analysis
student life cycle management.

Education White Papers

Managing the business of higher education: Analytics for better results

Analytics can help higher education institutions better understand all aspects of the business of education, from academics to finance to operations. Real-time access to a cross-campus foundation of accurate and detailed data supports effective decisions about student achievement and lifecycle, course planning, operations, purchasing, budgeting, forecasting and more.

Analytics for Achievement: Understand success and boost performance in primary and secondary education

Around the world, in both developing and developed countries,too many primary and secondary students are falling below proficiency levels. Measuring and monitoring performance and understanding the factors at play in student achievement can help educators create the right conditions and design the most effective interventions for student success.

Expand your analytical capabilities throughout the student lifecycle: A brief guide to modules for IBM SPSS Statistics Base and related products for academic institutions

Within academia, it is more important than ever to make smart decisions that generate measurable benefits. With IBM SPSS Statistics Base and other modules, departments throughout an institution can direct and automate analyses that provide actionable information for various points of the student lifecycle.

Cortell challenged and questioned why we do certain things certain ways

Challenge

Managing the student load forecasting, cost management and consequential financial implications at Griffith was at times a very manual and labour intensive process, something Stuart Jones, Deputy Director, Planning and Financial Services at the University sought to improve.

“The current processes placed heavy burdens on certain individuals to manage and maintain. The processes were slow, difficult to change and certainly difficult to integrate, end to end. The university was very reliant on the skills of a select few and a heavy Excel based framework to support its core financial and student modelling environment”

The university also ran a centralized Data warehouse and an activity based costing solution built on an Oracle and SAS platform. The Data warehouse captured information relevant to the operational aspects of the student but didn’t provide the flexibility and dynamic modeling capability required to capture, consolidate, forecast and model student load plans and subsequent financial metrics.

Further to this the activity based costing module was too difficult to maintain and ideally needed to be integrated to the student and financial planning models.

Fordham University and IBM are collaborating on a new business analytics curriculum to help prepare college students for careers in key industries such as energy and utilities, healthcare, education, transportation and public service that are expected to benefit from $1.8 trillion in global stimulus investments.

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IBM Cognos Business Analytics software helps your organization better understand, anticipate and shape business outcomes. You can achieve breakthrough results and outperform your competition.

Cortell Australia will engage your team with senior business consultants who will help you assess which capabilities within IBM Cognos' Business Analytics derive the most business value.

We offer an inital high level assesment followed by a customised demo and quotation. We can also help you build your internal business case.

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