Where is Business Intelligence going?
The following road map has been developed from several sources:
- Discussions with Business Intelligence System (BI) suppliers
- Discussions with those in HE and FE who are using BI systems, or planning them
- Published research and case studies
- Meetings and conferences
- Reports from outside the UK, and from outside the education sector
- Other trends in enterprise computing services
This is not an 'AA Route-planner' map: it does not tell you the best, fastest, or only way to get from now to the future. It is much more like Google Earth: it shows some aspects of a space, part of which you might visit or move into. Some parts of the space are given in more detail, some are fuzzier. Some parts of the space will be relevant to your institution, some will not. You may already be in some neighbourhoods and they may look different on the ground from our brief outline.
If you can improve these descriptions, please add your comments and experiences (just as you would add photos to Google Earth). If any part of this is useful to you, please use it; if not, please ignore it.
Current State of the BI Market in Education
Large vendors
Smaller vendors dedicated to BI
Suppliers specifically experienced in the education market
The BI vendor market consolidated during 2007 and 2008. The result is a relatively mature mix of large vendors, smaller vendors dedicated to BI, and suppliers specifically experienced in the education market.
In a typical competition, about 10 suppliers will bid initially, 3 to 5 will be shortlisted, and a suitable supplier (fitting both technical and commercial criteria) will be selected. There should be no barrier to BI from the supplier side.
One industry consulted during this project source believed there are only about 10-15 real, effective, enterprise-wide BI systems in the UK education sector. This means that much of the road map for the next few years will be installing new BI systems and extending existing partial BI systems.
Growing adoption - wider use
The financial, political and competitive pressures on the UK Education sector is likely to mean that all institutions will require an effective BI system during the next few years. The benefits in efficiency, knowledge-based decisions, and improved responses to pressures will be understood by more and more HE and FE institutions and will lead to a rapid spread of BI systems.
Also, as those institutions with effective, enterprise-wide BI systems share their experiences, and as BI vendors gain experience in the Education sector and tune their offerings to meet the specific needs of Education, it will become easier to justify and implement BI.
Greater Autonomy - wider audience
There will be an equal growth of BI within each institution. Systems used mainly by administrators and senior staff will spread onto Intranets (for all academic and service staff) and onto Websites (for students, parents, suppliers, and the public). There will be two aspects of this growth in the audience for each BI system.
Some audience growth will be driven by defined reports or dashboard elements, presented on intranet or internet sites. These will be available to internal and public viewers, but will not be customisable. The viewer will see the data selected by an administrator, and will have no control over those data.
Other audience growth will be driven by options to allow users to have autonomous access (within a carefully designed and frequently tested security model). In this case, users will be able to select which data they view, what time periods they see, and how data are related and presented. This may include students seeing their own results and comparing their results to class means and to prior year aggregates. It is likely to include 'green' data showing water and energy use by the whole institution and by significant parts (buildings or faculties).
More automation
Some present BI systems involve manual transfer of data from the source to the BI system. Other environments include double entry of data into more than one source system. For reasons of efficiency, speed and accuracy, more and more data will be captured only once (and captured as automatically as possible). Once captured, data will be shared among systems without further change or intervention.
Another aspect of automation is 'automated alerting'. At present, most BI systems expect the user to look at the system on their own initiative, and even to navigate the system by hand. In the future, BI systems will alert key users when specific KPIs exceed their target tolerance, and will even lead the user to the subset of data that have caused the deviation. A more active, automated interaction between busy users and BI systems will lead to a quick recognition of any deviation from plans or KPIs, and a quick resolution of any problems, whether they are financial, issues with a specific course, or concerns about a specific group of students.
Incorporate more Data Sources - 'Unstructured Data'
At present the majority of BI systems interact with databases and spreadsheets. They focus on numerical data. In future, as the inherent 'structures' in 'unstructured information' (documents, emails, letters) are recognised, BI systems will be able to interact with electronic document and records management systems and with email systems to report data from unstructured information sources.
This may include workflow reports, such as 'we have received term papers from X of our Y students', or 'M of the N term papers have been checked for plagiarism and have passed'. It may include calculations extracted from documents, such as 'the fifteen bids for this contract ranged from £a to £b'.
In parallel, BI systems will continue to interact with all of the internal structured data sources. These interactions will continue to be flexible and sophisticated, allowing the users to select data and to highlight or even correct faulty data.
Focus on Student Care and Retention
Many of those involved in BI in UK Education and experience from North America, suggest that an increased focus on student performance, student care and student retention is a key driver for BI and a key benefit from BI.
As UK HE and FE institutions become more familiar with BI, they will find ways to track students, to identify problems early and to intervene in ways appropriate for each institution. BI can help HE and FE institutions guide students to find and complete the courses and qualifications best suited to each students abilities, circumstances and aspirations.
BI, by gathering and maintaining 'a single version of the truth' can also help student mobility: the data about a student can be passed from one institution to another (with the student's permission and within the constraints of the Data Protection Act).
Increased 'What if?' Scenarios and Predictions
The education sector in Europe is entering a period of complex change. Money will be restricted, and sources of money will shift suddenly. Perceived needs for training of different sorts in different subjects will change, often unexpectedly and rapidly. New industries, disciplines and skills will appear and need academic support.
All of these changes can better be met and accommodated if an institution can quickly assemble data to ask 'What if we added this new course?', 'What if we reduced the size of this course?', 'What if we cooperated with this partner?', 'What if our income dropped by 20%?'.
Mature BI systems allow the full range of 'What If' questions to be asked and answered. This will be an important area of development and growth in educational BI.
More Local Links
Shared services, shared delivery of courses, movement from one institution to another, joint research initiatives, and other drivers are increasing the cooperation among institutions which share a geographical, intellectual, or academic neighbourhood. 'Local' in this sense may mean the same county or city; it may mean the same academic discipline; it may mean the Russell Group, or joint research into nanotechnology or sustainable building.
BI systems can support local links. Sometimes the local partners will share a single BI system. At other times the different BI systems of the partners will share defined data (within a security model and a formal data sharing agreement). In either case, shared data will make the partnership more efficient and more effective. Transparently shared data will inform decisions, where (before BI) disputed data used to open rifts.
More Links to Overseas Partners
Universities are increasingly competing and cooperating internationally. Links to overseas partners, both for recruiting students to come to the UK, for sending UK students abroad, and for delivering UK courses through a foreign partner, are important for some institutions. At present, BI systems do not support these overseas links as well as they might.
In future, BI systems will allow UK institutions to share data with their overseas partners. These data may help to recruit students, and they may help with shared courses. Some UK institutions will have campuses overseas, and their BI systems will be used to manage the foreign campus, and to coordinate data from the foreign campus with their UK data for overall management and development.
Changes in Enterprise Computing
Of course, any BI system must keep up with changes in enterprise computing. These will include:
- Developments in MS Office
- Developments in web browsers and the Web
- Developments in Social computing and mobile devices
- Increased use of Open Source software
- Changes in major database systems
- Increased use of internal (and external) clouds, with reduced local computing power (almost back to dumb terminals)
- Security challenges
Open Source Systems
The future may also hold some expansion in the use of open source BI systems (e.g. see Pentaho). It is hard to predict whether the open source market will grow significantly or continue as a small contributor to applications. It should certainly be watched.
