Client Spotlight: Oklahoma City Community College
Newly appointed president, Dr. Paul Sechrist is leading a new "way forward" for Oklahoma City Community College (OCCC). With a vision to be one of the "most significant community colleges in the nation," OCCC administrators and faculty have been challenged to focus on outcomes and student success.
OCCC has partnered with ASR Analytics to help it implement a culture of evidence through enterprise business intelligence and proactive decision support tools.
Business Intelligence to Lead the ‘Way Forward’ at OCCC
The difficulty OCCC faced in its quest to develop a culture of evidence was the fact that they lacked a cohesive reporting and business intelligence strategy. OCCC’s CIO, Dr. James Riha, recognized that the college needed an enterprise approach to information management and led the effort to procure an enterprise business intelligence platform from SAS.
From the outset, OCCC recognized that the implementation of business intelligence was more about the strategy and potential outcomes than the technology itself. Riha along with Stu Harvey, Executive Director of Strategic Planning (and co-leader for the project) built a coalition of institutional leaders including vice-presidents, deans, and other key decision makers to ensure institutional buy-in and project success.
OCCC partnered with ASR Analytics to work with its leadership team to architect a reporting regime that would start with key enrollment reporting and grow to include retention analysis and other high-priority subject areas.
“ASR’s team of professionals hit the ground running. In only three months vice-presidents, deans, and even our board of regents were able to view and interact with enrollment reports over the web,” said Riha. “More importantly, ASR encouraged us to look at our data in a variety of ways, always ensuring that we ask ourselves ‘what decision will we make now that we have this information?’”
With OCCC’s first business intelligence project under its belt, decision makers were chomping at the bit to tackle new subject areas. Future projects include comprehensive persistence, retention, and success analysis and include predictive modeling to understand the key drivers of attrition and ’stop-outs.’
“We plan to continue using ASR as our partner in our efforts to develop a culture of evidence at OCCC. Their experience in higher education and with business intelligence methods is invaluable and impressed decision makers across our campus,” said Riha.
As a result of this unique partnership approach, Oklahoma City Community College was able to:
- Deliver a comprehensive and sustainable reporting regime for Enrollment and Course registration analysis.
- Deploy enterprise business intelligence tools to decision makers across OCCC and all of its divisions.
- Shift from a practice of decision making that relied heavily on anecdotal information to one that relies on shared evidence and collaboration.
Stu Harvey articulated the most important benefit:
“The most profound impact—the user community will begin to think in different ways and improve what I call the ‘decision yield’ from the information, by which I mean the number of good, creative decisions and interventions at all levels in the organization.”
Learn more about ASR Analytics’ Business Intelligence solutions for higher education.