The decision we made in 2007 to use the data warehouse as our primary means of end-user reporting seems prescient. In the intervening five years we have built a true community of practice through the data warehouse. REX is used for official institutional reporting, reporting financial data, analysis of tuition revenue, classroom utilization, recruitment and admissions analysis, retention and student success, and analysis of campus support requests. REX has become essential to supporting the colleges and departments in accreditation and academic program reviews. REX has proved essential to performing a number of analytic studies, such as looking at the effect on graduation of scholar programs that build strong scholarly communities versus simply providing merit aid for recruitment and yield purposes. Today, senior administrators carry laptops to meetings and regularly go into REX to answer questions in real time. We have designed custom reports that include analytics and performance indicators that have helped us identify issues and make transformative changes that would not have been made without the data to understand why that change was important. We have indeed moved toward a data-driven culture of decision making using a campus-wide reporting solution.
http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/using-analytics-institutional-transformation
