Informatics and Reporting Tools

Since the 1980s, higher education has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on administrative technologies to improve access to information. Institutions implemented new enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, data marts, data warehouses, and technologies to improve reporting. This study analyzes the outcomes at more than 380 higher education institutions. It looks at what the chosen strategies have accomplished, in what ways institutions use the data they collect, whether institutions are investing more resources in tools that enable them to collect and manipulate management information, and the degree to which information and analysis are being used to support institutional decision making. A corporate edition is available here.

These Key Findings describe the major discoveries of the ECAR research study called "Academic Analytics: The Uses of Management Information and Technology in Higher Education". Since the 1980s, higher education has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on administrative technologies to improve access to information. Institutions implemented new enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, data marts, data warehouses, and technologies to improve reporting. This study analyzes the outcomes at more than 380 higher education institutions. It looks at what the chosen strategies have accomplished, in what ways institutions use the data they collect, whether institutions are investing more resources in tools that enable them to collect and manipulate management information, and the degree to which information and analysis are being used to support institutional decision making.

Since the 1980s, higher education has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on administrative technologies to improve access to information. Institutions implemented new enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, data marts, data warehouses, and technologies to improve reporting. This roadmap analyzes the outcomes at more than 380 higher education institutions. It looks at what the chosen strategies have accomplished, in what ways institutions use the data they collect, whether institutions are investing more resources in tools that enable them to collect and manipulate management information, and the degree to which information and analysis are being used to support institutional decision making.

This research bulletin describes the results of a study conducted at the University of California, Santa Barbara, into systems and project requirements for informatics in a broad range of scientific fields (including, but not limited to, bioscience fields), along with requirements in the social sciences and humanities. Faculty were interviewed about what has led them to develop informatics systems in support of their research and what factors are at the forefront as they seek to manage large amounts of research data in a decentralized and collaborative environment. The findings, a mix of the expected and unexpected, have laid the groundwork for new proposals in faculty IT support services.