Houston Community College Creates a Community Report Card
BI Improves Communication, Measures Performance, and Eases Impact of Budget Cuts
Houston Community College (HCC) serves 75,000 students in the Houston, Texas area each semester. Its campus encompasses six colleges spread out over 23 locations, covering 4.5 million square feet of floor space. Since its founding in 1971, the college has catered to nearly 1.5 million students. Each year more than 5,000 Associate Degrees and certificates are awarded.
Since community colleges like HCC cater to the interests of their local communities, they operate primarily using public funding from state and local governments. In a difficult economic climate, in which budget cuts are increasingly common, that funding is often in question. After struggling to find an easy method of presenting performance information to its board members, administrators, and the public, HCC enrolled Information Builders’ WebFOCUS business intelligence (BI) platform. HCC used WebFOCUS to create an academic dashboard that displays current performance metrics through a public-facing website.
Featuring interactive graphs and charts, the new BI system helps the college document and evaluate decisions, measure student enrollment, track student outcomes, and provide access to key student performance indicators. College administrators, board members, and managerial staff now have important information at their fingertips – a development that’s improved efficiency and enhanced data quality efforts throughout the organization.
Many of the key performance indicators (KPIs) reflected in its Academic Dashboard coincide with state indicators, enabling the board to keep tabs on the accountability measures that are most important to the college. By operationalizing these dimensions and presenting them in a simple visual format, the college can continually monitor its progress in key areas, improving accountability and enhancing communication between the college and the board. As HCC board member Bruce Austin puts it, the dashboard system serves as “a report card to the community.”
Using the new BI environment, Austin and other board members can view the operations of the college at designated levels, and make tactical adjustments to guide the institution toward strategic results. “We can now compare and communicate educational and administrative strategy, monitor and adjust the execution of limited budget dollars effectively, and gain real-time access to critical high-level summary information about the college,” he notes.
A Crash Course in Business Intelligence
Two key individuals have driven HCC’s BI endeavors: Bill Carter, vice chancellor of information technology, and Dr. Martha Oburn, executive director of institutional research. Their motivation was simple. They knew that college administrators and board members needed to get their hands on current information to monitor organizational performance and manage costs. When they had to depend on IT to access and analyze information, that process had been difficult.
“We wanted a dashboard that could give everybody a common frame of reference when they examined the performance of our institution,” explains Carter. “When users can simply select a data set and access pertinent reports, it eliminates the need for IT to write multiple reports to extract business data. We knew that giving the staff more flexibility would make the organization more efficient and allow the IT team to spend more time pursuing strategic initiatives.”
As a publicly funded institution, HCC had limited funds to spend on the project. “It was important that the development of the dashboard was cost-effective,” adds Oburn. “As a result, we looked for BI technology that could read various types of data, was easy to implement, and had excellent support services. Information Builders stood out in all of these areas, and its WebFOCUS BI platform appeared to be the easiest to learn and use.”
HCC purchased WebFOCUS and within two months had a working dashboard environment available to the staff, the board, and the general public.
Graduating to New BI Enhancements
Today HCC’s academic dashboard includes nine categories of information, accessible via a simple set of tabs: access, completions, faculty ratios, financial aid, persistence/retention, placement, satisfaction, student engagement, and transfers. The data is displayed in colorful charts and graphs, allowing users to drill down into the specific information they are most interested in.
For example, the Transfer tab reveals where students with academic and technical certificates go after they leave the college, such as to a job or to another college.
The Access tab reveals the number of students enrolled, the number of units they take, and the portion of the local population who are HCC students.
The Financial Aid tab shows the number and percentage of students receiving aid, along with the types and amount of aid distributed.
Other parts of the Academic Dashboard monitor student satisfaction, employee satisfaction, job placement trends, student retention, enrollment, awards, and many other pertinent metrics.
Making the Grade for Students
According to Richard Schechter, chairman of the board at Houston Community College, every decision they make must consider the continuing success of students. He values the Academic Dashboard for its ability to measure student success through metrics, all of which enable the college to determine how well it is meeting the community’s goals. “Through the dashboard indicators we are able to recognize the areas in which we are doing well, as well as those that need improvement,” he notes, calling WebFOCUS a “great tool for an institution that desires clarity and accountability.”
In preparation for tightening budgets from the state, Dr. Oburn says this enhanced level of communication will help the college identify the best area to make cuts without detrimental effects on the college’s overall performance. “As we examine potential budget cuts, this enhanced access to information about the operation of the college’s key functions will encourage open communication between the college and the board as everyone involved thinks about the best way to allocate resources.”
HCC’s online dashboards are seen as a model that other institutions strive to emulate. Dr. Oburn has been asked to present the BI solution at several national meetings. She says her colleagues praise the HCC dashboard for being slick, easy to use, and easy to update. She explains that BI technology has helped her institution cut costs on many levels, primarily by increasing the efficiency of the IT staff. In addition, staff members don’t have to track down information and print reports because everything is easy to view online. The college’s in-house analysts save time, she adds, simplifying the burden on the IT department and increasing efficiency overall.
“There are no existing packaged solutions that can do what HCC has created using WebFOCUS,” declares Dr. Oburn. “WebFOCUS replaces individual spreadsheets with metric dashboards that display key performance graphs, making the entire organization more cost-conscious. That’s an accomplishment that resonates throughout the educational community.”
Thanks to the success and broad appeal of the new BI dashboards, WebFOCUS has become HCC’s enterprise BI standard for student data. In the near future, the college plans to add additional KPIs to reflect new goals and benchmarks. They also plan to use WebFOCUS Active Technologies to make it easier for users to drill into a designated data set and to automatically populate reports. Currently department heads must extract data from static PDF reports and load it into Excel to study the number of students, credit hours, and so forth. WebFOCUS parameterized reports will give them a great deal of analytic flexibility, while WebFOCUS ReportCaster will let them automatically send updated reports out to other executive staff members.
Board Chairman Richard Schechter believes that these updates will help the college to focus on its primary goal: raising the quality of its teaching and learning. That’s a goal that everyone in the community can get behind.