Data Management, Institutional Research and Reporting Services

IData’s experienced professionals know your administrative systems and understand the business of higher education. We strive to bridge the gap between your IR and IT departments. The following services are available to help your institution succeed:

• Data Management and Reporting Process Services – Institutional reporting continues to be a struggle across higher education. We believe that this struggle is primarily caused by lack of communication, documentation and best practices in reporting. These can be addressed by improving processes within the institution. IData would approach this in several phases: education, information gathering, planning, implementing and review. During each of these phases, IData consultants will work directly with staff from all departments involved in the request, creation and consumption of reports within the administration. Click here for more details on this packaged service.

• The Data Cookbook – As part of a suite of reporting services, IData has developed an online service to assist institutions in communicating and defining their reporting terms and report definitions. Watch a short video describing the Data Cookbook.

• IR and Data Analyst Staff Augmentation-Add an experienced and dedicated resource to your team with IData. We can provide resources with expert knowledge in your administrative systems to extract needed data and provide easy access for your analysis. This service can be provided with a series of short scheduled consultations, or a more extended arrangement with an allotted number of hours per month.

• Project-based Institutional Research and Reporting Services -If your institution is faced with a larger project, such as implementing a new reporting strategy or recreating a new fact book, then IData can provide experienced resources to assist in all aspects of the process. With our project-based services, we can provide a time and materials proposal that describes how IData can help your institution complete the project successfully. Read the Columbus State University case study.

• Custom Report Design and Development -IData can work with your staff to create the requirements and design for any custom reporting project for your administrative system.

• Data Warehouse Design – If your institution is interested in creating a data warehouse solution or in adding new data marts to your existing warehouse, then IData and our partner companies can work with you to design the appropriate warehouse. Read the Kirkwood Community College case study.

• ETL Design and Implementation -IData can create the Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) design and programming in order to bring your data warehouse to life. Our understanding of the data structures of major higher education administrative systems as well as the higher education business functionality help us to create data extraction designs that are both accurate and fast.

• Reporting Inventory -IData can work with IT, IR, and functional users to create a full inventory of your institution’s existing reports. Using Data Cookbook, we can document all reports and build the unified reporting terms (data elements) dictionary. We can also document the data governance structure.

• Capture and Track Custom Data – Institutions sometimes find that a particular analysis requires information which is not currently contained or integrated with their administrative system. IData can add custom database tables and fields that are integrated directly with the existing administrative system. Using the appropriate development tools and best practices, IData can also create integrated, custom data entry forms and workflows. These custom workflows allow information to be entered and tracked in conjunction with existing related data.