IU Business Intelligence Project Profile
Project Title:
Submitted by:
Date:
Enrollment Management by Term
Mary Beth Myers, Linda Hadley-Kearney, Mike Carroll, Linda Shepard & Richard Shepherd
April 26, 2010
1. Project Description
One of the fundamental responsibilities of each school and department is offering courses which meet
the graduation/elective requirements for their students and often students pursuing other majors. The
extent to which course management is done well impacts academic funding, student satisfaction, faculty
satisfaction, tuition revenue, retention/graduation, enrollment management, etc. While a variety of
reports are currently available for the general consumer of class information, few, if any, reports/tools
exist which pull together information valuable for making good comprehensive decisions. In these
financial times, with the rapidly increasing enrollment growth at many campuses, along with the onset of
the General Education curriculum, academic units need to position their resources most effectively.
Faculty may be asked to take on additional students or courses while students may be asked to take
courses that are their second or third choice to satisfy their degree requirements. The information
generated from this project will help academic units make quick but sound decisions to offer the most
needed courses, better understand how to allocate resources as well as justify some radical changes they
may need to make.
While a large and diverse set of enrollment management data exists, it exists as unconnected entities.
Currently very few individuals have the expertise or access to pull all of these pieces of data together for
a comprehensive view of enrollment management. Making the information more accessible to a broader
range of people in a consistent manner would be a good first step; however, placing a set of BI tools
(perhaps from a web delivered interface) on top of these data would improve the display of information
(consistent methodologies), improve communication about enrollment data and therefore enrollment
decisions would be more fully informed. Additionally, each academic unit currently may approach the
enrollment management task with their own methodology, making it difficult to evaluate the impact of
those decisions at a school or campus level. Consistent data and methodologies allow the information to
be rolled up at various levels, which should provide a broader view of course management than currently
exists today.
The foundation for this project is a much needed (system wide) longitudinal database that then needs to
be manipulated by a developer/researcher. Existing data sources would be connected creating a more
comprehensive view of information impacting enrollment management. Then, BI would provide the
developer/researcher with some direction in analytical approaches with flexibility to review information
in a variety of slices/views. The end user (a person that does not need to know the technical
environment) would also greatly benefit from a sophisticated BI analysis tool on top of the data (e.g.,
creating an interactive dashboard, which would provide drill downs into various course attributes,
comparison groups, etc.). Subsequent phases of this project could then address more analytical
questions (e.g., predicting course demand) and bring in additional data (e.g., historical information,
student academic requirements information).
The value of this project includes:
 Readily available enrollment management decision support environment.
 Consistency of data sources and consistency of course enrollment management approaches
 Showcase and explore various BI functionality
 Provide a foundation for further course enrollment management projects incorporating other
data sources (e.g., data gathered from the academic advising).
 Potential to explore the analytics of BI, predicting course demand, as a future incremental step.
a. What are the project objectives and deliverables?
The long term deliverable of this project is to develop an enrollment management (EM) information
environment that is useful for course, student, faculty, and budget planning for department chairs,
deans, schools and the campus. The EM environment should support campus planning such that student
progress toward degree, retention strategies and graduation rates are enhanced. The environment must
be easy to understand, easy to manipulate and offer a broad range of information in a seamless
environment. The environment must also be flexible enough to grow and expand.
The project lends itself to an incremental approach: 1) developing foundational information sources, 2)
adding historical and student enrollment information, and 3) predicting future needs (courses, spaces,
classrooms). Phases of the project will also cluster around various units of data, 1) classroom space
data, 2) schedule of classes data, 3) student enrollment data, 4) grade distribution data, 5) budget
information, and 6) faculty data. The value of the deliverables improves as data sources are added;
however, so does the complexity and time to completion. The phases below describe an incremental
approach toward a more comprehensive enrollment management system, starting with basic core data
and core functionality and adding new data sources at each phase, thereby enhancing the functionality at
each phase.
Phase 1:
An initial deliverable at phase one would be an interactive (web delivery) platform for enrollment
management (EM) decision support information during a particular term. While long-term, longitudinal
data is ultimately needed for effective enrollment management, Phase 1 is aimed at providing those data
services within a given term. End-users with minimal technical expertise of the data would be able to
easily manipulate the information across the many aspects of enrollment management. So for example,
deans, enrollment managers, budget managers would be able to consider how to allocate their
expenditures for the upcoming term by looking at the current course offerings, enrollments, waitlists and
room availability. A school dean would be able to view a broad range of information at various levels of
aggregation (including course, department, or school levels):
 current credit hours generated for that semester,
 potential number of credit hours if waitlists were satisfied,
 how might waitlists be satisfied,
 review of low enrollment courses,
 compare enrollment limits with room capacity to consider adding spaces and increasing credit
hours.
This phase includes the foundational work of creating an infrastructure for enrollment management
data, identifying data sources, creating meaningful connections among the sources. Inventories of
existing reports and data needs would be evaluated for possible inclusion in phase 1 or subsequent
phases. While the focus for BI projects is on non-technical end-users, a by-product of this EM data would
also benefit individuals with more technical expertise, consistent methodologies and key data definitions
in one place.
A dashboard from U of Texas at San Antonio provides some idea of what is possible in terms of
presentation, and may provide some general direction for capacity issues in particular
http://www.utsa.edu/registrar/roomsched/rsdashboards/ClassroomsLabs%20Facilities%20by%20Campu
s%20by%20Building.pdf
Other potentially useful ideas may come from the Minnesota site:
http://www.classroom.umn.edu/scheduling/dashboard.asp
Phase 2 of this project will capitalize on what we know from previous semesters in terms of resource
allocations, student performance, and student characteristics. This phase of the project may provide
opportunities for viewing the sequential ordering of courses, capitalize on the historical offering
successes (or failures), greater understanding of student attributes (e.g., class standing, major) and
performance in courses. Some questions that may be answered at this phase include:
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How can previous waitlist data inform our understanding of course demand?
How often is a course offered over a selected time frame?
What are the course enrollment trends over time?
What are and have been the attributes of students in these courses?
How successful are students in these courses?
For this phase, historical data may not be readily available for all campuses so an inventory of existing
data as well as a strategy for maintaining historical data would need to be developed.
The success of bringing in historical information (phase 2) is important for the success of making
predictions into the future (phase 3). Following this initial foundational work, Phase 3 + would then be
positioned to consider other enrollment management information (e.g., from degree audit information,
faculty data), and subsequently provide more predictive views of information. Future deliverables would
include predicting enrollments based on student degree progress information, information to discern
(from the student perspective) the impact of budget cuts on course offerings, information to assess
faculty load/utilization issues, information for resource planning in future terms, information for
assessing program growth/attrition, and integration of historical data and trend information. Here is a list
of questions discussed by this initial committee that should be saved for future direction:
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If we know there are 700 additional new students coming to campus, how can we help
schools/departments determine which courses need additional seats or sections, if any?
How much additional classroom space is needed?
How can planning be improved to align course offerings with student degree completion
requirements (considering the various data sources, Academic Advising, Course Planner)?
If a department wanted to open a new section of a course, what classrooms/times would best
optimize getting the most students into that class?
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How can we utilize our historical data (grade distribution data, course evaluation, course
inventory, research interests) to understand faculty expertise? Which faculty are available to
teach a course at a given time?
What are the annual faculty teaching loads?
How can we plan for future classroom needs? What sizes of classrooms do we need?
Can we create some what if scenarios for enrollment management and degree planning? For
example, students who took this course were also likely to take these courses.
The objectives in this incremental approach include creating foundational views of enrollment
management data, helping us learn more about BI, developing some long awaited tools to help our
campuses make informed decisions, taking positive actions towards a more comprehensive enrollment
management tool set.
b. Who are the target users?
Users will include school deans and departmental chairs and staff responsible for managing class/course
offering, faculty loads, and related budgetary impacts.
c. What functionality will be provided to users?
See section a. above. A comprehensive suite of information will be provided to enrollment managers.
Beginning with basic descriptive information and ending with comprehensive true ENROLLMENT
MANAGEMENT information, including information to manage course offerings to enhance student
progress to degree completion.
Who is the primary sponsor?
There is not an executive sponsor who is endorsing this project, however this project was authored and
advocated by Mary Beth Myers and Linda Shepard who are also its sponsors. If other sponsors are
needed Roland Cote, Becky Porter, Roger Thompson, Jean Robinson, Tine Lindemann, and Scott Feickart
have/or would endorse this project.
2. Resource Requirements
a. What are the critical resources for this project?
i. Suggested leads
Leads have not been discussed but will likely include those who submitted this document or
experts in the Enrollment Services/Management offices.
ii. Functional data experts
Functional data experts will include but not be limited to:
 Project leads
 Mike Carroll (IUB)
 Ethan Bernhardt (IUB)
 Carla Boyd (IUPUI)
 Avery Nelson (IUPUI)
iii. Technical
Technical resources will depend on answers to questions such as “will we model data specifically
for this project”, “what tools will we use”, “what will the database environment be” etc.
iv. Other
b. What other resources will be required for project success?
We will want to get input from other campus experts such as Nelson De Leon from the Northwest
Campus. Other possible participants include: John Novak (NW), Lynn Williams Dean of College at SB,
Kathy Buckman (SB), Jack Tharpe (KO), Dennis Hicks (E), Jan Williamson (SE), Enrollment manager (SE),
Julie Stines (Facilities)
3. Proposed Time-line
a. What are the timeline requirements and dependencies on other projects?
With increased student enrollment and the onset of the General Education Curriculum, we should move
forward with the initial phases of the project. An objective is to manage the scope of the project, but
deliver the functionality of greatest value in the minimum amount of time.
4. Source Data
a. What systems and applications generate the information needed?
Most of the information needed is generated by the SIS & HR PeopleSoft/Oracle applications. Facilities
information from the CAFM system may be used but is not a requirement. It was decided we will not
pursue the information housed in the Ad Astra room scheduling system.
b. What source data is required and where is it currently housed?
The source data required is currently available in our data warehouse, however it may not be organized
appropriately to support this project and may need to be re-modeled.
c. Will the project require external data or departmental data?
Not at this time.
d. Do any required data elements already exist in the data warehouse?
All of them do, based on preliminary design & functionality assumptions.
e. How much historical data is required?
This needs to be decided for phase 2. It is likely that data currently does not exist for regional campuses
and should be collected sooner rather than later. A strategy for maintaining historical information needs
to be developed.
5. Security
a. What are the security requirements or concerns unique to this project?
This is unclear at this time.
6. Risks
a. What risks are associated with the project?
The primary risk associated with this project is scope creep since it could potentially involve a wide range
of information and functionality. If we take on too much it we will decrease the likelihood of delivering
successfully in an appropriate amount of time. Raising expectations too high is also a risk.
b. What is the strategy for managing the risk?
The requirements & objectives for the project will be carefully documented and communicated in order
to manage expectations. During the design process the scope and resource requirements will be
continually reviewed. Some functionality may not be included in a phase if it negatively impacts our
ability to deliver successfully and in an appropriate amount of time.
7. Success Criteria
a. What are the measurable success criteria for the project?
This project will be successful if, in an appropriate amount of time, we provide tools and information to
enrollment managers that enhance their ability to make sound decisions, decisions that improve the
utilization of classroom space, class enrollments and teaching resources.