“This move is an exciting step forward for the business intelligence side of BizDelta as it continues its growth in helping businesses align their technology and data strategies”, said Jeff Burns, CEO of BizDelta. “For the last several months, our business intelligence practice has been focused on the higher education market where we’ve made strong connections into the planning and research communities of colleges and universities nationwide and have begun to see a change in the way these organizations are looking at their data landscape. Forming the business intelligence practice as its own company allows us to have a more focused effort for each of our two practice areas–BizDelta focusing on business development and Smart Data Decisions focusing on business intelligence with a particular focus on higher education. Our two divisions will now operate as separate, partner companies with exclusive focus on their core markets.”
“The creation of Smart Data Decisions is the logical next step in the evolution of our business intelligence practice,” said Bob Scott, BI Practice Lead for BizDelta. “Over the last year we’ve built a strong, cross-divisional culture of helping companies reevaluate key aspects of their business growth and decision-making. With the good traction that we’ve had recently, it’s the right time to take the next step in creating individual brands that can focus on specific areas of our type of consulting. I look forward to continuing our growth in this new partnership.”
- Business Intelligence, Analytics, Data Trust and Utilization
Business Development, Sales, Marketing, Lead Generation
Smart Data Decisions continues the mission of BizDelta’s business intelligence division in helping companies make better use of their business intelligence tools and data. Companies in their target market are realizing that the solution to their data visibility challenges is not always adding more technologies but revisiting the use of their existing technologies, making smart additions where needed, and building better people and process connections between IT and business users. Smart Data Decisions will continue helping its customers create better strategies for accessing, sharing and using their data without leading with the complexity of new tools.
Smart Data Decisions will officially launch on August 3, 2015. For more information about these two companies, please visit BizDelta.com or SmartDataDecisions.com.
Lincoln University in PA is using SDD’s Business Intelligence Pool Workshop to guide them toward a central data analysis and reporting repository that is both trusted and shared across campus. The workshop will also target improving Lincoln’s use of all enrollment, recruiting and assessment data from existing systems.
The goal is a system that is used by the entire institution to inform decisions and monitor results. IR and Planning are leading the team with all other groups represented on a steering committee.
“Creating this type of collaborative approach is a SDD hallmark”, said Bob Scott, BI Practice Lead for SDD. “We are guiding this team, all of whom are stakeholders in the data and planned system, through step-by-step action items to achieve a mutually-beneficial goal. Through the workshop, we are identifying key data elements needed, documenting everything in a dictionary as we go and finding the quality issues that need to be addressed. We’ll then add key analytics and structured dashboards to share the data and the trends with the first tier of end users in the Academic, Finance and Enrollment areas. We share a full vision of always-available information and will get there iteratively, while creating immediate analytics needed now–and therefore immediate return on investment.”
The SDD Pool Workshop is specifically designed to allow the SDD BI Team to play a supporting role in driving to best practice application of business intelligence without taking over the project.
“Our goal is to work slowly in small, achievable—and fully-understandable—steps that keep the initiative moving forward at all times” said Scott. “Ultimately we want to train the team at Lincoln to build and maintain an internal process to manage the resulting shared BI system as an asset going forward. This approach has been consistently well-received by our customers. We look forward to an extremely successful outcome given the strong team commitment we’ve enjoyed from Lincoln.”
The Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities (APLU) is a research, policy, and advocacy organization dedicated to strengthening and advancing the work of public universities in the U.S., Canada and Mexico.
Access to—and analysis of—the vast array of publicly-available data submitted by colleges—both member and non—is an integral need to help APLU serve these three areas on behalf of their members. By creating an always available, integrated, streamlined database of higher education data, SDD is helping APLU achieve a broader range of research topics, a more longitudinal approach, and the ability to quickly respond to legislative queries that almost always come with ‘need it yesterday’ deadlines – thus allowing APLU staff throughout to reduce manual operations and focus on what the data tells them about the state of Higher Education.
Southern University at Shreveport Louisiana (SUSLA) has selected Bilander Group’s Binocle platform to monitor their student lifecycle analytics. In addition, the university will leverage automation capabilities to reduce the complexities associated with creating and maintaining critical reports. One of the fastest growing two-year institutions in the USA, SUSLA maintains a close watch on student progress through their institution and will use the higher education dashboards to focus on every stage including student enrollment, performance, retention and graduation. The university joins a growing number of educational institutions turning to SDD’s higher education business intelligence guidance. (SDD is an associate of Bilander Group, producers of enterprise business intelligence solutions.)
The University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma (USAO) has selected Bilander Group’s Binocle platform to analyze emerging trends across their student population. Metrics from recruitment, admissions, enrollment, retention, graduation and more will combine to show opportunities to engage students as they progress through the university program. In addition, USAO will leverage data mining, alerting and automation capabilities to reduce administrative overhead in compliance report generation, spreadsheet management and monitoring key performance indicators. The University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma is a public liberal arts college located in Chickasha, Oklahoma. (SDD is an associate of Bilander Group, producers of enterprise business intelligence solutions.)
Expense Reduction Analysts (ERA) analyzes customer expenditures across 30 different categories and provides analysis, advice and vendor negotiations to help reduce associated costs. ERA uses Bilander Group’s Binocle platform to create a visual monthly dashboard detailing recent client spending patterns. Binocle then helps ERA’s customers identify areas where fees are higher than they need to be – thus generating a more productive review and allowing customers to monitor and control ongoing expenses. SDD has worked closely with ERA to ensure that they are aligning their clients’ organizational data to best practice business intelligence. (SDD is an associate of Bilander Group, producers of enterprise business intelligence solutions.)