As I mentioned in my previous blog post, I am sharing best practices that I learned from talking to education customers about successful implement ions of information management, reporting and analytics at their K-12 school district or higher education institutions. In that first post, we learned about the importance of securing executive sponsorship for the project. The next step is to identify and involve stakeholders early and assess their unique needs.

In both K-12 and higher education, you’ll have a wide variety of potential users, ranging from different internal users and the school board/board of regents to government bodies, media, parents and the general public. These stakeholders can have vastly different skill sets and requirements. So it’s vital that you identify and engage these stakeholders early in the reporting and analytics planning process, view them as customers, and analyze and segment them.

Armed with detailed insights into the stakeholders you are supporting, you can develop a very targeted and valuable reporting and analytics solution. For example, data experts need to know the metrics the different stakeholders need so they can consolidate that data from multiple disparate databases into an enterprise data warehouse that supports the required information and reports. Similarly, before business intelligence experts can create desired reports, they need to know what kind of reporting users need, the detail level they prefer, visualization, drill-down requirements, and more.

Stay tuned for my next post when I share the third best practice: identify and integrate authoritative, trusted data sources. Or you can read the full white paper now: 10 Tips from SAS Education customers.