Information Builders > Case Studies > Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board Overachieves With WebFOCUS

Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board Overachieves With WebFOCUS

Company Size

1,000+

Region

America

Country

United States

Product

WebFOCUS
ReportCaster
InfoAssist
GIS adapter for Esri
Active Technology reports

Tech Stack

SQL Server
Microsoft Excel
Adobe PDF

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Customer Satisfaction
Productivity Improvements

Technology Category

Analytics & Modeling - Predictive Analytics
Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics

Applicable Industries

Education

Applicable Functions

Business Operation

Use Cases

Inventory Management
Real-Time Location System (RTLS)

Services

Data Science Services
System Integration

About The Customer

The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) oversees the state’s higher education program to ensure excellence among all public colleges and universities. One of the key functions of THECB is to develop, implement, and evaluate a long-range strategic plan for Texas higher education. For example, the THECB’s “Closing the Gaps by 2015” initiative centers on four goals: increasing student participation, increasing student success, expanding institutional excellence, and increasing research expenditures. To reach these and other objectives, THECB needed to increase the efficiency of its staff. At the same time, it needed to improve communication and information sharing with external stakeholders. As THECB was migrating from a mainframe to a server-based environment, the agency turned to Information Builders’ WebFOCUS business intelligence (BI) platform to enhance information management across and beyond the organization.

The Challenge

The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) oversees all public postsecondary education in Texas. It works with various entities to provide the citizens of Texas with the widest access to higher education of the highest quality possible. One of the key functions of THECB is to develop, implement, and evaluate a long-range strategic plan for Texas higher education. For example, the THECB’s “Closing the Gaps by 2015” initiative centers on four goals: increasing student participation, increasing student success, expanding institutional excellence, and increasing research expenditures. To reach these and other objectives, THECB needed to increase the efficiency of its staff. At the same time, it needed to improve communication and information sharing with external stakeholders. As THECB was migrating from a mainframe to a server-based environment, the agency turned to Information Builders’ WebFOCUS business intelligence (BI) platform to enhance information management across and beyond the organization.

The Solution

Through a series of dashboards, portals, and reports, the agency has transformed the way data is accessed and used, allowing internal and external users to immediately retrieve and review vital details about the state’s higher education community. This has not only improved internal productivity, but also has dramatically enhanced visibility and accountability among colleges and universities statewide. WebFOCUS was initially leveraged to create an outward-facing query and reporting application known as PREP (Profile Reports Electronically Produced). This environment allows agency staff and public external stakeholders – legislators, schools and higher education institutions, state agencies, educators, researchers, businesses, and professional organizations – to access THECB data stored in a large relational SQL Server data warehouse. The warehouse contains approximately 20 years’ worth of information about enrollment and degrees, as well as more than 10 years of information about faculty, classes, and applicants. Other collections are being added to the warehouse, and PREP will be expanded with links into those collections.

Operational Impact

By eliminating cumbersome manual reporting processes and printed reports, and making information instantly available to users inside and outside the agency, THECB has the insight it needs to meet its goals as well as to increase visibility and accountability.
WebFOCUS has made everyone more efficient. It has significantly increased the speed and ease with which our staff members can access information in our databases by eliminating the need for them to extract data and then move it into another tool.
This improved productivity has become a key benefit for us, as we are under increasing pressure to cut costs and make better use of our resources.
I don’t think there’s an area of the organization that isn’t using WebFOCUS to support their day-to-day tasks. Once we deployed it, the value was so significant that everyone jumped on board.

Quantitative Benefit

The warehouse contains approximately 20 years’ worth of information about enrollment and degrees, as well as more than 10 years of information about faculty, classes, and applicants.