It's a common problem: Your organization collects vast amounts and types of data – but it's spread across different departments and locations in various formats and systems. It’s a massive challenge to make all that data available, connected and usable to everyone who needs it.

That was the scene at North Carolina State University. But Marc Hoit, Vice Chancellor for Information Technology and CIO came up with a solution that creates a holistic view of diverse university data spanning departments, campuses, functions and activities.

Their existing systems had built-in reporting, but those reports were confined to individual data silos. For example, some departments had custom reports just for them. Hoit’s group wanted to link all the data and put it into usable formats for analysis and reporting – potentially transforming enterprise decision making across the university.

In order to do this they needed to reduce the number of reports. They wanted the reports to be more flexible and for users to become self-sufficient. After all, being able to access and analyze all that data – even if it seems unrelated – has big implications for students, educators and even entire educational systems.

To learn more about what Marc Hoit was able to accomplish at North Carolina State University read this paper - Empowering Enterprise Decision Making: How North Carolina State University Makes Data Available, Interconnected and Usable. He shares some great insights, advice and lessons learned.