Coppin State University is a historically black comprehensive, model urban, four-year University.  Coppin offers 23 undergraduate majors and 10 graduate-degree majors in liberal arts, sciences, business, education, and nursing. Located in the northwest section of Baltimore, Coppin has a unique mission, primarily focusing on the problems, needs, and aspirations of urban communities specifically Baltimore City residents and the immediate metropolitan area. 

Coppin immerses its students in a technology rich environment to prepare them for the market place leveraging technology to make learning and program administration more effective and to contribute academic achievement models to the city, state, and nation.

With the implementation of PeopleSoft ERP system in 2004, Coppin's small IT staff was faced with the challenge of meeting general reporting requirement while also meeting the need for business performance information across the campus, and optimize our investment in the ERP system.   Per Dr. Ahmed El-Haggan, VP for IT and CIO, We faced the realization that our decision making process should be based on data, not assumptions or politics, and we needed something that would help us make informed decisions in a timely manner.   Campus was looking for reporting tool to empower our senior managers and executives to know the status of the major business processes with the ease of a mouse click, and to meet complex monitoring and reporting requirements associated with accreditation processes.   Such a tool had to be a web based solution with Dashboard function to indicate the status of Key Performance Indicators, and easy-to-use with minimal training.  After a thorough review of the market, we determined that iStrategy's HigherEd Analytics delivered an end-to-end out of the box warehouse with Key Performance Indicators, dashboards and more that was installed in days and implemented in weeks when compared to a typical BI- data warehousing implementation which is a long complex project.

The real power of the Analytics was the ability to look at high level aggregates of key performance measures, then drill down to decompose the totals to its ingredients enabling smart decision making at all levels. The BI application implemented at Coppin is easy to use and requires very little training. Additionally, new reports could be built in minutes and report accuracy has been greatly improved. At Coppin, our executives, directors, deans and department chairs have access to Analytics that include many custom reporting modules. Because Higher Ed Analytics requires a minimal client technical installation, it is easy to use and we have campus wide acceptance of the application.

For Coppin, this was an ideal project requiring minimum effort with maximum benefit that could be implemented within a very short time.    The IT department collaborated with functional users from the Office of Admissions and Records/Registration, and embarked on this project to implement initial Student Analytics modules with its dashboard and KPI capability.  Within 6 months of implementation of Student Analytics, the campus was preparing for NCATE accreditation and thought of Analytics to help monitor and report on students in Education program.   

Success of these 2 projects is to be attributed to executive sponsorship and support of the Provost.     There after, support was extended to deploying Student Analytics with dashboard and KPI capability to all areas of Academic Division.   Currently, over 100 users including Deans, Chairs, Program Coordinators, and Administrative Assistants use HigherEd Analytics to assist them in their operational requirements

Coppin chose Higher Ed Analytics because of its ease of implementation, little overhead and minimum effort required to support such a product.  Design of the data warehouse, and reporting tools were packaged for easy implementation.   It took days to build the data warehouse and weeks to implement the reporting libraries.    Because the data models were already available, Coppin did not have to hire a full-tile data warehousing or BI experts.   Higher Ed Analytics, out of box solution met most of our normal operational reporting and analytical requirements.

By implementing Student Analytics, Coppin empowered campus administrators to view the data online, anywhere, anytime.    Having the capability to view incoming applicant pool by school, by state and enrollment counts with a user friendly web interface significantly improved Enrollment Management team capabilities.  Academic departments were able to view and assess student enrollment by program, adjust course capacities, faculty assignments etc.,   Trend reports by program and school, helped Deans, Chairs and Program Coordinators in their operation. 

Reporting capability: 

With the implementation of Analytics, Campus reporting capability increased significantly at all levels:(1) functional users in the Office of Admissions and Records/Registration review applicant and enrollment data and KPIs, (2) department chairs/deans review in-coming applicant group and adjust course offerings,  review enrolled population, and perhaps follow-up on those potential students who may not have yet enrolled, (3) advisement office are able to review students who accumulated enough credits but not yet graduated, (4) ancillary departments benefit from a subset of many of the reports that are available in analytics.    

Having, such flexible reporting capability opened up other opportunities where Coppin utilized Analytics to meet many complex monitoring and reporting requirements during accreditation processes.   (1) The reporting cube developed for the School of Education (SOE) provides the Dean, Chair and program coordinators the ability to review by individual student or various phases in the Education program,   (2) The reporting module developed for the School of Arts and Sciences (SAS) is used increasingly for program development, student advisement, and scheduling.  The Dean  uses the data for executive reporting, and included in the SAS fact book section of the SAS Annual Report for 2008-2009 [a new addition].    Coppin has just added 4 new reporting modules in the areas of Health Information Management, Public School Administration, Nursing and Sports Management to meet various accreditation requirements (Appendix 1).   

Training: 

Coppin technical staff required minimum technical training and functional users developed expertise while participating in the verification and validation process.    End user training was a phased activity grouped by department/school/division.  Having such groups allowed us to clarify and address department/school specific questions.   With our training strategy of "less is more", we phased the training into beginner, and advanced levels.   The reports and briefings were also deployed in stages, which did not overwhelm the users and enabled us to stay focused on what's important for now and move forward with other reporting requirements. 

Yes

Yes

- 	Increased capability for overall planning by providing easy access to applicant/enrollment data, demographic information and KPIs.
-	Capability to analyze applicant and enrollment data, yield by state/school/zip and adjust recruitment efforts.
-	Capability to anticipate course demand by analyzing admitted/enrolled student counts by academic level by school and program.
-	Easy analysis of non-returning students to help improve retention.
-	Capabilities to analyze class schedule to make efficient use of facility.
-	Readily available enrollment and FTE counts at school and department level resulting in increased awareness amongst Deans, Chairs and Program Coordinators.
-	Chairs and Deans access Student Analytics reports to review incoming and enrolled population for program development, schedule adjustments.
-	Availability of standardized reports across campus.
-	By developing custom reporting modules, Coppin has met the complex monitoring and reporting requirement of various accreditation processes.

"We passed the NCATE accreditation with flying colors, because we had the Microsoft BI solution, which gave us the access to crucial information with a click of the button."
      By Dr, Sadie Gregory, Provost and VP of Academic Affairs, Coppin State University

Coppin's Nursing School gets numerous grants and the process includes time consuming research and plans to use Analytics to help them in future.  In preparing for a grant recently, Dr. Copes, Dean of Nursing School said "with the use of Analytics, Nursing School was able to independently get all the pertinent data needed and saved two to three weeks worth of research work."

"Using Microsoft BI solution, our Education School was able to pull together all NCATE information for review in a matter of hours and then they integrated the information into a self study." 
         Dr. Habtu Braha, Chair of the Faculty Information Technology Committee, Coppin State University

"Microsoft Publishes Case Study about Coppin's Business Intelligence Solution" - Microsoft, December 2007   (http://www.coppin.edu/award/CSU_MS_BI_Study.pdf)

Coppin State University is at the forefront of leveraging the large investments made in ERP systems such as PeopleSoft and turning the raw transactional data into actionable information that can be leveraged across the school.  Today, colleges and universities across the country are struggling to meet the increasing demands for institutional accountability that have been increasing in all areas of the campus. 
  
The School of Education has created a unique plug in module to its ERP system that provides NCATE accreditation information that has been recognized as a leap forward in providing accessible information around student performance and success.  The platform provides a detailed review of the milestones and metrics of each student as they progress toward their Education degree.  In addition to providing a clear information path for the accreditation process, it also delivers a systemic review process that can be used to provide earlier interventions for each student through school counselors.

The application has been so successful that Coppin is now working with other schools to implement and share its NCATE accreditation module so that other colleges and universities can benefit from their efforts.  

In addition, other schools within Coppin have successfully adopted School of Education model to work with IT to design, develop and implement data models to meet accreditation requirements for their specific programs (Appendix 1). 

Coppin has also deployed a reporting module that will allow IT staff to look at Help  Desk calls,  and analyze calls by department, call type, user etc.,  This module also includes a report that analyzes results of Satisfactory survey that is sent upon completing a task.  

- 	Easy implementation and the availability of the out-of-the box reports.
-	Flexibility of the Analytics to quickly develop and deploy data models. 
-	Exemplary executive sponsorship.  Provost has been the champion of the project to deploy Student Analytics so that all Academic Administrators could make decisions based on the data.

Coppin's IT and functional departments have "small staff" and committing resources was a challenge.  It took a Part-Time IT staff to go thru a web training course and start supporting the Analytics.  Other users needed very minimal training, perhaps 1-2 hrs mostly to understand the terminology and tips and tricks.

Coppin's staff spent considerable amount of time to understand "business process requirements", and we were able to apply design model from our earlier successful projects thus reducing development efforts.   It was still a challenge to stay within our guideline that we would use the ERP system to maintain accreditation related data "without any customization".  

With the full "support" of our Provost and the CIO, we identified key users who then became the "Champions" of the application and promoted the product to their peers.  Acceptance was much higher when a Chair or an Administrative Assistant discussed with their counterparts on how he/she was using the system.

The difficulties we encountered were not related to the funding or the actual steps required to implement the projects but related to getting wide acceptance initially from the users.  Now everyone wants to be part of Analytics users group.

By identifying and nurturing a few users to become champions of the project, we were able to address the concerns and fears of each group that the technology is no threat to their jobs, but will allow them to perform at higher capacity and efficiency.  Having executive support for the project help bring quick "buy-in" from the users.  

Exceeded

Success of development and deployment of our initial data model to meet School of Education accreditation reporting requirement generated interest from other areas of the college.   Here's how Coppin went about implementing BI solutions:

-	Coppin was the catalyst in implementing BI product and now there are other campuses who have implemented or in various stages of implementation within University System of Maryland.  
-	Custom data models designed, developed and implemented at Coppin have brought attention by other schools and a couple of such data models are in various stages of implementation at other schools.
-	Successfully develop and deploy NCATE reporting model that meets NCATE accreditation requirements.  This data model is also implemented at another school.
-	Successfully develop and deploy GER reporting model to meet Middle States accreditation requirement for Standard 12.  
-	Successfully develop data models for Schools of Nursing to meet the data and reporting requirement of  Nursing and Health Information Management program accreditation.
-	Development and deployment of data models for Post Secondary School Administration program reporting requirement is in progress. 
-	Development and deployment of data models for Sports Management program reporting requirement is in progress.
-	In the process of analyzing reporting requirements for Athletics Department that meets NCAA monitorig and reporting guidelines on Athletes.

Coppin started with a few departmental users and a handful of Administrators.  The big push came upon successfully demonstrating to the Provost, how Student Analytics could help the Academic division.  The Provost became the champion who encouraged the Deans, Chairs and Program Coordinators to use Student Analytics to manage their areas. 

Because of the easy access to applicant and enrollment data, few VPs embraced Student Analytics much faster than others. 

Student Analytics is currently deployed to more than 100 users including VPs, and custom module access is restricted to those who work with accreditation process.