Colleges and universities have access to enormous stores of data and analytics has the power to help higher education tackle some of its biggest challenges.

Larry Burns, Assistant Director of Institutional Research and Information Management (IRIM), Oklahoma State University (OSU) knows a great deal about the power of analytics to take on OSU’s data challenges. He and the IRIM team are on an analytics journey to transform how data is consumed and utilized for strategic decision making. Analytics provides the trustworthy data, information and insights needed to inform strategy and decision making so they can anticipate the future and respond proactively to changing trends.

Watch the following videos to learn more about OSU’s analytics journey:

Addressing the challenges with getting data, information, and reports to the users and executives.

 

 

How users and executives now have the power themselves to look into the data to answer their own questions…

 

 

The impact of data and analytics

 

 

Demonstrating value

 

Best practices for getting started on a data driven journey

 

 

Why did OSU choose SAS?

According to Burns, "We needed something that was not just visuals. We needed something that could do the statistics, that could do the predictive analytics. We also needed something that could handle our data management needs. We’re a large institution with multiple campuses. And so we needed a way to manage the data for all of those students. We needed a tool that could do that, and SAS was the only one we could find."

Watch the rest of Larry Burns’ video interview  and read their success story for learn more about OSU's analytics journey. Also check out my previous blog post on Dr. Christie Hawkins, the Associate Vice-President for Administration and Finance and Director of IRIM, on how she and her team are spearheading the culture of analytics at OSU.

Read these Ten Tips for Using Data Visualization and Analytics Effectively in Education