Open Universities Australia supports growth through business intelligence

Since 1993, Open Universities Australia (OUA) has helped over 200,000 students achieve their educational and career goals. The national leader in online learning, OUA offers students a flexible way to access higher education and enhance their professional development. By recognising students’ needs for a learning option that fits into their lives, OUA offers them the ability to study online anytime, anywhere, and at a pace that suits them.

OUA provides opportunities for anyone, no matter their age, location or previous education, to study towards the same qualifications as on-campus students. In its efforts to help students undertake online higher education or professional development to transform their lives, OUA offers over 1,400 course units and 170 qualifications online, with teaching provided by academics from more than 20 leading universities and other tertiary education providers around Australia.

Growing demands on analysis and reporting

OUA’s value proposition is to provide flexible, quality courses in an open environment. In order to deliver on that value proposition, OUA needs an in-depth understanding of the needs of students seeking courses. As the business grew, it created ever-increasing demands for reporting and analysis in areas such as marketing, academic products and operations. However, with a growth rate of over 20 percent per year, the range and volume of data was exceeding the capabilities of the organisation’s existing reporting and analysis tools.

Geoff Edlund, OUA’s Analytics Director, determined that the business needed a system which could allow for quick analysis using data cubes, and reduce the time taken to develop and produce reports. “We wanted a quick and easy way of performing data-mining and conducting analysis to support rapid decision-making and identification of value opportunities,” he says.

As a result, OUA issued a tender seeking both an effective reporting system and a highly experienced partner with the business and technology skills to deliver it.

A scalable solution for competitive advantage

Having evaluated a range of options, OUA selected IBM Cognos Business Intelligence, which it believed would offer several key advantages over the other solutions that OUA evaluated. Geoff Edlund says that he saw the Cognos solution as “highly scalable – with the ability to be incorporated with a set of other IBM products to cover reporting, business analysis, modelling and financials.”

He adds: “We could see that IBM Cognos Business Intelligence would give us a competitive advantage, by enhancing reporting on our students, courses and business channels.”

OUA chose Certus Solutions, an IBM Business Partner, to implement its new analytics platform, due to the Certus team’s extensive capabilities and experience in similar projects with other customers.

“Over more than 10 years of working with Cognos solutions this is the template success story I see time and time again,” says Greg Keller, Account Manager at Certus Solutions. “It’s wonderful seeing how easily the IBM Business Analytics solutions allow our customers to build the foundations for their strategic decision-making platforms. The ability to roll out in Cognos in a modular and agile way provides an immediate impact and return to the business.”

Communication is the key to project success

Certus worked closely with the OUA team to define the requirements for the initial solution and deliver the first stage of the deployment, using a standard system development lifecycle to create a solution that closely met OUA’s business needs.

Testing strategies, plans and scripts were developed to ensure effective testing. It was essential to get the right OUA business partners and users involved in user acceptance testing (UAT) sessions to ensure constructive feedback. Developers from Certus worked on-site with OUA’s own team – enabling “shadowing” and knowledge transfer to develop in-house skills that would assist future extension and support of the solution.

Certus delivered strong and deft project management throughout to ensure the solution was delivered on budget. Based on previous experience, it knew that a key factor in successful projects is consistent communication with relevant stakeholders. In the OUA project, this started with cementing buy-in from senior management. Throughout the engagement process, weekly status meetings and status reports ensured that the team adhered to its plans.

Better, faster decision-making

Stage one of Open Universities Australia’s business intelligence and analytics initiative introduced IBM Cognos Business Intelligence and IBM Cognos TM1 to provide analytical capabilities for core areas such as finance, student performance and the sales & service department.

The new solution quickly delivered clear benefits to OUA’s academic products, sales and marketing teams. New levels of granularity of reporting supported better and faster decision-making. Managers were now able to answer queries about students, courses, and business channels on the spot – and faster reporting resulted in greater productivity and business efficiency. For example, reports that once took weeks to produce began to take just minutes.

Building on initial success

Stage two saw further adoption of the solution as the company’s senior executives began to see the tangible benefits of analytics. Following the introduction of Nigel Sagolj as Business Intelligence Manager at OUA, he quickly established a Business Intelligence Competency Centre (BICC) to manage the analytics programme and create standards for its future development.

The BICC team realised that self-service reporting would make a vital contribution to the value that OUA would obtain from analytics, and worked with Certus to design a training manual to help users leverage tools such as IBM Cognos Query Studio. The team created a training programme for 75 users across the business, which is re-run every six months to teach new users and serve as a refresher for existing users. As a result, these users can now create their own customised analyses – from high-level overviews to detailed drill-down reports.

“Reporting used to be a very time-consuming and complex process that was seen as a laborious chore,” says Nigel Sagolj, Business Intelligence Manager at OUA. “Now both the business and the analytics team are starting to see it as something that can deliver real business value. The great thing about IBM Cognos at OUA is that it has transformed our ability to provide information to the business. As a result, the users have really engaged with the solution, and we’re constantly finding new ways to monitor sales performance, build on student retention and further improve the level of service we can offer to our students and providers.”

Harnessing the power of Cognos 10

Stage two also saw the BICC team perform an upgrade to the latest version of IBM Cognos Business Intelligence. Cognos 10 has enabled the introduction of features such as Active Report, which allows users to interact with dynamic reports even if they are not online and connected to the central Cognos server. The BICC team foresees this as a major benefit, especially since OUA’s executives will be able to access these reports on their iPads when they are on the road or in meetings.

Supporting student performance and retention

Two of the most important areas where OUA is focusing its analytics efforts are student performance and retention – both of which are key challenges for all higher education providers.

“There are all sorts of analyses we can perform in these areas,” comments Nigel Sagolj. “To take one example, data analysis and reporting based on course information and the student’s geographic and demographic data, employment history, previous education and behaviour enable us to highlight online students who are likely to require additional academic support or services.”

New insights into marketing and sales

OUA has also implemented IBM SPSS Modeler, which enables the BICC team to mine data and create sophisticated statistical models that can be used for additional predictive analyses. The use of Modeler is currently at an early stage, but the team has already begun using the tool for student segmentation, student support initiatives and scoring to support its sales and marketing efforts. By analysing data on students and their preferences, these models will enable OUA to develop new and more competitive educational products, and offer them to the right students at the right time.

“The outputs from IBM SPSS Modeler allow us to target groups of students more effectively,” says Laura Hague, Modelling and Analytics Manager at OUA. “It’s going to be a key tool to help us support students with the most relevant services and interventions, and also to enable us to increase revenues via the most appropriate sales campaigns.”

The SPSS solution is integrated with Cognos Business Intelligence, and the results of the SPSS analyses are already being used to enrich OUA’s reports. The combination of Cognos and SPSS is expected to deliver significant benefits – especially for the Sales & Service department, which deals directly with current and prospective students via its call centre. This department has shown improvement in its support for online students by using data from student surveys and the learning management system.

Open Universities Australia intends to use the analytics solution to boost sales performance by monitoring which courses and course units are selling best, and giving sales and service agents the information they need to help them offer the right products to the right customers at the right time.

“The improved reporting contained within Cognos 10 has already enabled the Sales & Service department to react more quickly to changes in sales patterns,” says Freddy Lopez, Sales & Service Director at OUA. “The ever-increasing improvements made within Cognos and our ability to utilise its capabilities more fully will only create further benefits down the road.”

Strategic leader

Stage three of the initiative has consolidated and matured the data in the business intelligence and analytics platform, using a sophisticated framework to include initial external unstructured data sources about the education market and general population. The development of additional data systems for a new range of departments has fulfilled the growing needs for quantitative information. This has provided powerful insights into student and market trends that have consolidated Open Universities Australia’s position as a leader in online learning.

Looking to the future

As Open Universities Australia has completed stage three of its business intelligence and analytics initiative, it is now developing an enterprise-wide data warehouse that will include data from a broad range of OUA’s internal systems and take a variety of data feeds from external sources using both structured and unstructured data, for use by the business.

OUA will concurrently investigate technologies around the complexities and volume required for “big data” from digital and learning management systems. The data warehouse is intended to empower advanced modelling and forecasting capabilities, enabling OUA to get the maximum advantage from its investment in the IBM Cognos and SPSS technologies.

Nigel Sagolj concludes: “The evolution of analytics at Open Universities Australia is gathering pace. We have already seen a significant shift from a focus on sensing and responding towards a more forward-looking, predictive model that serves as a guide to future action. As we continue to develop our Cognos and SPSS deployments, we are increasingly seeing users across the organisation taking a more informed, evidence-based approach to decision-making, which is helping us successfully design new education products, enter new markets, and focus on continued growth.”

About Certus Solutions

Certus Solutions’ business analytics and information management practice is trusted by its clients to deliver end-to-end solutions incorporating enterprise reporting, analytics, budgeting and forecasting, data warehousing, master data management, and information governance solutions. As the largest dedicated IBM software and services partner in Australia, Certus brings process, people and technology together.

Certus has a reputation for excellence, the highest quality staff, and the delivery of true business value to more than 500 clients – its rapid growth has been predominantly supported by repeat engagements and word-of-mouth referrals. Clients appreciate its track record in delivering rapid ROI on the widest range of IBM-based solutions, from collaboration, information and assets to infrastructure and web-based solutions, as well as managing complex licensing issues.

Certus’ business analytics and information management experts assist clients to strategically govern information, empowering them to monitor, report, analyse, forecast and predict in order to make the right decisions quickly.

To learn more about Certus, please visit www.certussolutions.com

About IBM Business Analytics

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