One of Australia's largest universities, Deakin has upgraded to Cognos 8 to keep executive management and government up to date on student enrolment information.
The university first implemented Cognos in 2004 and is upgrading to Cognos 8 for increased flexibility in filtering and building ad hoc reports to support decisions across the entire university.
For example, a faculty can now look at data on student load and slice the data in any dimension to focus on specific student characteristics.
The organization also wanted the flexibility to roll out analysis, metrics, and event management capabilities to support changing business needs in the future within Cognos 8 BI's single product and architecture.
Deakin plans to expand Cognos 8 BI to report HR and financial information from several transactional data systems which reside outside the data warehouse, such as Alesco.
Michael Gibson, data warehouse manager, planning unit at Deakin, said there is a lot of time-consuming and manual processes currently involved with getting data out of the transaction systems.
"The upgrade will greatly simplify these processes and enable executive management, in particular, to access data they didn't have before in a timely fashion," Gibson said.
"In addition, we can make better management decisions by accessing information related to university-wide planning, infrastructure, staffing, and marketing, while meeting strict government compliance regulations."
The director of education and government solutions at Cognos, Terence Atkinson, said over 1000 education institutions worldwide use Cognos including the University of Wollongong, the University of Toronto in Canada, the George Washington University in the US and the University of Ulster in Ireland.
The BI market in the Asia Pacific region is growing faster than the global average, according to a Gartner study.
The BI software market in the region is forecasted to grow at a compounded annual growth rate of 13 percent -- faster than the global rate of 7.3 percent. The same study cites that chief information officer (CIO) respondents ranked BI as the number one technology priority for 2006.