Campus-Wide Adoption of True SelfService Reporting and Dashboards at North Iowa Area Community College Optimizes Decision-Making

• Analytics & Modeling - Predictive Analytics
• Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Visualization
• Functional Applications - Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERP)

• Education

• Business Operation
• Quality Assurance

• System Integration
• Training

North Iowa Area Community College (NIACC) faced significant challenges with their existing reporting and dashboard solutions. The college, which serves over 3,700 degree-seeking students annually and thousands more through non-credit programs, relied heavily on Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) since migrating their Ellucian Colleague system to SQL in 2007. The Technology Services department was responsible for creating and deploying views of specific data from their Colleague database, but end-users had to teach themselves to use SSRS to run reports against these pre-configured views. This setup led to several issues: end-users could only access data in pre-configured views, any changes or additional data access required requests to Technology Services, and reports often ran slowly when too much data was added to pre-defined views. Additionally, NIACC used SAP Business Objects for dashboard creation, but the software's complexity limited its use to only four employees, leaving many dashboard requests unfulfilled.

North Iowa Area Community College (NIACC) is an educational institution that serves over 3,700 degree-seeking students each year, along with thousands more through non-credit programs. The college employs approximately 300 staff members and offers a range of programs and services to its students. Greg Bailey, the Director of Enterprise Applications in the Technology Services department, oversees the Colleague ERP system and related third-party products at the college. NIACC had been using Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) since migrating their Ellucian Colleague system to SQL in 2007. The college's Technology Services department was responsible for creating and deploying views of specific data from their Colleague database, and end-users had to teach themselves to use SSRS to run reports against these pre-configured views. The college also used SAP Business Objects for dashboard creation, but the software's complexity limited its use to only a few employees.

To address these challenges, NIACC sought a new reporting and dashboard solution that would provide greater flexibility and ease of use for end-users. They chose Entrinsik Informer, a solution known for its intuitive interface and powerful reporting, scheduling, and security features. NIACC aimed to implement a reporting solution that could easily answer questions as they arose, join tables and views in the background to give end-users access to more data with less reliance on Technology Services, and roll out reporting to a wider audience with an intuitive point-and-click solution. They also wanted to take reporting to the next level with interactive dashboards for decision-making and take advantage of reporting, analytics, automation, dashboards, and other data analysis capabilities. After implementing Informer, NIACC hired a new staff member to head their new reporting direction. Despite having no prior experience with Informer, the new staff member quickly became comfortable with the system and could set up security, users, reports, dashboards, analytics, filters, and more without assistance. Informer's ease of use allowed NIACC to deliver up-to-date data to support business decisions in a much shorter timeframe than with other tools.

• NIACC is leveraging Informer's end-user-friendly capabilities to migrate all offices from SSRS to Informer, with six offices fully migrated so far. An increasing number of users are utilizing Informer, with more users being added about every two weeks, without the need for lengthy training or technical expertise.
• Informer is very intuitive and easy to train end-users to either run reports or build their own. Building the metadata is straightforward, and users can build what they need as they need it. The college is excited about the capabilities delivered so far with Informer.
• NIACC has been leveraging Informer dashboards heavily, with the entire faculty and staff having access to current dashboards through the College's Portal. Users quickly built dashboards to illustrate the impact of their retention efforts, leading to a rethinking of their retention direction.

• NIACC serves more than 3,700 degree-seeking students each year.
• The college employs approximately 300 staff members.
• Six offices have fully migrated from SSRS to Informer so far.