OVERVIEW
Target audience: McGill administrative staff
Business Intelligence (BI) refers to a set of technologies and practices used to support planning and decision-making in a company or organization. This article provides an overview of how BI is implemented and used at McGill.
In this article:
What is Business Intelligence (BI)?
Business Intelligence (BI) is a method of structuring, analyzing, and leveraging data. Organizations use BI to understand their business better and connect that understanding with their strategic decision-making.
BI systems are built using specialized databases and software, but successful BI goes further than technology alone. When implemented well, BI enables greater analysis of an organization's data. BI gives decision-makers the tools and methods to transform flat data to gain a deeper understanding and take informed action.
Business Intelligence concepts are increasingly present in higher education, where they are sometimes called Academic Analytics. At universities with a tradition of centralized internal strategic analysis – such as McGill – BI brings an analytic approach to the rest of the enterprise.
How does BI apply to McGill?
At McGill, all business decisions, their impacts, and how these are connected to the University's overall strategy must be carefully considered at each level of the organization. The Business Intelligence platform plays a key role in this process.
Whenever a business unit sets its enrolment targets, makes hiring decisions, or assesses its performance, it requires access to data relevant to these operations. This includes the current status, emerging trends, and factors influencing this data.
Unfortunately, predefined reports and one-off querying (usually via requests to a programmer or analyst) seldom provide enough detail or flexibility to create an accurate picture.
By contrast, the tools in McGill's BI platform are user-friendly and made for spontaneous analysis. The platform's web dashboards and reports enable ad hoc analytics and drill-down capabilities from high-level summaries to details, as well as the retrieval of individual records with just a few mouse clicks, providing decision-makers with the critical data they need.
How is BI implemented at McGill?
The Business Intelligence platform consists of multiple components that are often in development simultaneously:
- The DWH – Data Warehouse: An operational data warehouse that provides a range of prepared data sources, built on Banner and current data from other systems. It is an Oracle database.
- The EDW – Enterprise Data Warehouse: A data warehouse that integrates current and historical data from disparate sources in one central repository, built on Banner and data from other systems. It is built on the Microsoft BI suite.
- Self-serve analysis tools for managers and administrators: These allow users to connect directly to the BI data. These tools are suited for "power users" and include Microsoft Excel, Power BI and Crystal Reports.
- Strategic dashboards and interactive BI reports, delivered via web browser: These are designed to give managers a graphical representation of an area and enable them to analyze this data more deeply.
McGill's Business Intelligence platform is based on the Microsoft BI suite, which includes all the tools needed to build data "cubes" and publish dashboards and reports.
In the future, the EDW will gradually incorporate data from various areas of the University, including some that have not previously been combined. For example, a "Student lifecycle" encompasses all phases from admissions to graduation, but each component is stored and reported separately in our data systems. The EDW would put these side by side, enabling us to perform a complete lifecycle analysis.
