In Brief
- The University of Alabama (UA) updated its enterprise IT architecture with a focus on reporting and analytics to drive more informed decision making and enhance performance across campus.
- The university implemented Huron’s Higher Education Performance Analytics (HEPA) suite to provide leadership across the university with a single source of at-the-ready strategic and operational insights throughout the administrative, academic, and research portfolios.
- Achievements include deploying all academic and administrative modules, developing and deploying new research and space, and cost and revenue allocation modules to improve operational efficiency and results.
Challenge: Building an analytics infrastructure
Colleges and universities are increasingly aware of the vital role that reliable data plays in fostering accountability and informed decision making. With this understanding, The University of Alabama embarked on a transformative journey to provide leadership better line-of-sight into business operations, research outcomes, and student success with more impactful data, information, and insights.
After developing a technology road map and completing multiple data management projects to align its existing systems with its cloud aspirations, UA identified an immediate need for an analytics framework that could integrate with its existing systems and the new systems it planned to implement.
One pivotal technology strategy introduced was Huron’s Higher Education Performance Analytics suite. HEPA provides college and university leaders with broad and detailed analytics capabilities to improve decision making and support the alignment of resources, priorities, and mission for improved outcomes across the institution.
Approach: Flexible analytics solutions
Ten modules of the HEPA suite are currently available, and more are in development. These include spend analytics, institutional financial health, academic portfolio, research administration, cost and revenue allocation, space analytics, student lifecycle, talent life cycle, recruitment analytics, and financial aid optimization.
The first step was to build consensus on desired outcomes and alignment on the data and its meaning to ensure that the project produced actionable insights tied to UA's institutional goals.
To achieve this, Huron tailored the suite to meet UA's needs, utilizing the existing technology to accelerate progress in building unique insights and solutions for specific data queries.
HEPA integrates external and public data from over 20 sources, including Moody's, the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), and clinicaltrials.gov. This has allowed UA to benchmark its performance against peer institutions for multiple dimensions of university operations.
Built using the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform, HEPA also incorporates complex back-end modeling, cross-domain reporting, and AI-driven analytics that UA can use for future predictive and prescriptive insights.
Results: Enhanced data-driven decision making
Beginning with the research enterprise, outcomes that have moved UA closer to its long-term vision for enterprise reporting and analytics include:
- Monthly research performance reviews: Generating monthly research portfolio reviews to track year-over-year performance and trends for in-house awards, burn rates, and proposal pipelines by college and faculty.
- Strategic space allocation: Ensuring the efficient use of resources by using the space module to calculate space density metrics and make informed decisions on space allocation relative to funding.
The University of Alabama continues to add new HEPA data and insights to enable additional benchmarking, conduct trends analyses, and more. It is also onboarding analytics applications in other areas, including procurement and academic portfolio management, to build on the suite's capabilities for universitywide use. This provides the university with a complete picture of its performance across campus and lays the groundwork for future success in data and analytics innovation to drive meaningful change.