Progress continues for McMaster’s efforts to improve access to institutional data and information.

A team based in Institutional Research and Analysis, working closely in collaboration with business units across campus, is building the university’s business intelligence/analytics initiative.

The team has released BI dashboards on:

• Research awards (launched July 2017)
• Research accounting (December 2017)
• IQAP (launched March 2018)
• Payroll (launched August 2018)
• Research centres and institutes (launched October 2018)
• PI dashboard and research project statements (Release 1 in May 2019, Release 2 in July 2019 and Release 3 coming in September 2019)

In December 2018, the first phase of the student records BI dashboards was released, focused on course enrolment. Users are able to view current and historical course enrolments, course planning reports including course scheduling and instructor information, and student grades.

Phase two of the student records implementation in BI launching on August 30, 2019 includes a new dashboard on student records – term statistics, and is focused on student enrolment. The new dashboard provides insight into how many students are enrolled in each faculty, program or plan; student performance including  academic standing, reinstatements and GPA; term counts for graduate students and more.

The reports were developed to give users across the university quick access to student enrolment information.

“Business intelligence reports analyze the institution’s raw data and provide insights that can be shared and used, across different faculties and departments, to improve efficiency, increase productivity and inform academic regulations and business process decisions,” says Melissa Pool, university registrar.

“This is the next important step to improving access to data and information for our community,” says Jacy Lee, associate vice-president, Institutional Research and Analysis. “We are working hard to provide timely and relevant information to the community.”

For this launch, university executives, deans, assistant deans, directors of finance and administration, department chairs and department administrators, program administrators and users from the registrar’s office and School of Graduate Studies have access to both the student records – course dashboard and the new student records – term statistics dashboard.

If you have questions concerning the BI/analytics program or would like access or training, please contact Amjad Ghafoor, senior manager, business intelligence and analytics at ghafoa1@mcmaster.ca or Chris Ferguson, analytics and BI analyst at ferguscr@mcmaster.ca.