Federal Student Aid oversees the distribution of massive amounts of money to students. The 150 schools that participate in the Quality Assurance Program were the initial and remain the primary users of the ISIR Analysis Tool. These schools alone deliver $21 billion in Pell Grants each year. A recent FSA study determined that if they did no verification at all, they would have awarded nine percent of grant recipients too much aid and six percent of grant recipients too little aid. The reports available in the ISIR Analysis Tool allowed them to prevent most of this potential 15 percent error rate by verifying students most likely to make mistakes on their initial applications. 

The huge number of dollars at risk for improper payments in the Pell Grant program was further compromised with an ineffective form of communication among student applicants for financial aid, post-secondary institutions that disbursed the aid and the FSA office itself. With an increasing emphasis on online communication in government offices, FSA looked to increase the effectiveness of its interactions with both students and colleges, while simultaneously decreasing the cost of that enhanced communication. 

As a solution to both of these complex problems, FSA envisioned a sleek and sophisticated online environment that would modernize its ISIR Analysis Tool from a PC-based software environment to a state-of-the-art web product. In the end, this highly advanced tool transformed the way that student aid is delivered across the country.

In its current online form, the ISIR Analysis Tool has become a standard practice at hundreds of colleges and universities across the country. It enables their financial aid staff to upload student records from a federal data mart, compare a set of transactions, run a series of standard reports and develop customized ad hoc reports. It is the first of its kind. By contrast, FSA's other web-based products only allow users to read, download and upload information.

Schools can even apply filters to tailor the reports on the ISIR tool to their specific needs, and then use this information to make informed decisions about their processes and procedures. FSA also uses the ISIR tool to aggregate data and analyze the effectiveness of institutionally developed verification systems. Ultimately, the enhanced verification methods promoted by the ISIR tool help schools minimize the number of potential errors in the Pell Grant Program. 

While transitioning from an old, PC-based product to the web-based application in 2003, the FSA team faced the challenge of restructuring existing analytic templates to work within the new online environment. Since FSA had trained the schools to use a series of standard reports and a specific set of templates, the team wanted to maintain consistency between the old and new environments. Unfortunately, the department had no known resources, internally or externally, with experience developing a web-based application of this kind. 

Since the ISIR tool uses a school's data to dynamically populate a series of reports in a way that is similar to common corporate reporting, the organization chose to use business intelligence technology to develop the application. After considering products from several business intelligence vendors, the team selected Information Builders WebFOCUS because it combines intuitive dashboards and drillable reports with complex analytic capabilities. Not only was the software powerful enough to handle hundreds of thousands of records from schools across the nation, but it could process all of that information through standard web browsers. The FSA team received exceptional customer service from Information Builders' staff, and determined that WebFOCUS had all of the applicable analytic capabilities that they required while still remaining so intuitive and easy to use. 

These business intelligence capabilities provided precisely what the college staff members needed to streamline their student aid processes. Previously, schools would collect the students financial aid data on their own, and then attempt to analyze it using whatever distinct systems their campuses provided. This was a huge burden on each individual college's financial aid department. With the new ISIR tool, however, Federal Student Aid and all of the participating colleges and universities can operate under one highly effective system. They can now analyze real time data using common reports in spite of the schools' disparate systems. They can also migrate all previously developed standard reports to the web while taking advantage of the ad hoc reporting capabilities of the new BI environment.

Currently, the team is in the process of deploying WebFOCUS Active Reports in order to provide even greater analytic capabilities to users. This unique reporting technology combines data-sharing and analytic capabilities in a single, Java-script-powered document. These dynamic reports can be downloaded and viewed within a browser, whether a user is online or offline, which means users at each college don't need any BI software to analyze the information. Reports can be published online or e-mailed to other users, and because the source data is included in the file, anybody can drill down and perform custom analyses.

Yes

Yes

By developing analytic frameworks for the schools, the ISIR Analysis Tool greatly reduces any barriers to analyzing the results of FAFSA verification programs on their campuses. This allows more schools to make informed decisions in their student outreach, and it allows them to make discretionary verification efforts that would not be possible if the schools had to bear the full cost of the analysis themselves. 

College and university financial aid administrators usually have very little time and few resources to devote to data analysis. With only two to three hours of training on the ISIR tool, they can now load their data into FSAs analytic frameworks, giving them the ability to conduct analysis on their financial aid applicants without additional assistance. They no longer need to depend on their institutions IT staff to develop programs and queries to address the needs of the Financial Aid Officethe ISIR tool does it all for them.

In addition, the online version of the ISIR system allows members of FSA to collaborate with the schools by developing ad hoc reports to share with the larger community. One of the most important reports, called the Field Change Report, lists items on the FAFSA that are most frequently changed after the application verification process. Tracking this information allows schools to discern which items their students are most likely to answer incorrectly, enabling financial aid staff to specifically target those items for verification. Schools can also use this information to improve their community outreach and education efforts, when they help new students fill out the FAFSA correctly.

Reports like the Field Change Report are made possible by the extensive data processing taking place at the FSA. The ISIR tool calls information from each particular schools own partition database to populate reports for that campus. If the individual schools were to ask for reports this flexible and powerful from their IT departments, most tech engineers simply wouldnt have the resources needed to develop them. Plus, the schools data systems only keep track of the most current information for any given student, but they fail to track a students financial aid history. The ISIR tool enables them to run complex reports on their verification processes, while also looking back at the changes made to an individual students FAFSA after a previous round of verification.

The application was initially developed for a group of 150 colleges and universities, and it is now available to any college or university nationwide. Currently, it is used by 400 to 600 staff members at more than 200 institutions across the country.

In the past, many financial aid departments would focus their verification efforts on the neediest students within their school populations. And yet, FSA repeatedly found that if these students had made errors on their FAFSAs, those errors were not significant enough to change their eligibility for aid. This meant that schools were essentially wasting their time, asking students and their families for financial information that rarely led to any meaningful change in their eligibility.

Not only did this inefficient process waste the schools time and resources, it also unnecessarily inconvenienced the verified students, whose families were asked to supply intensive financial records and other sensitive documents. With the ISIR tool, however, financial aid staff members can be confident that they are verifying the right students, allocating aid appropriately and using their resources wisely. 

Here are some quotes from users at various academic institutions:

"I have used the ISIR Analysis Tool for five years and have found it to be a wonderful resource," said John McPherson, Associate Director of Scholarships and Financial Aid at Ball State University. "It allows me to easily import records for analysis. Once records are loaded, the built-in reports and point-and-click menus allow me to see immediate results. We have been able to use the data to modify processes and streamline communications with our students."
 
"The ISIR Analysis Tool is an incredible tool available to institutional financial aid administrators," said Erik Melis, Associate Director, Office of Student Financial Aid, George Mason University. "The tool is very user-friendly and extremely adaptable, and it can be used in both simple and complex modes for analyzing samples of financial aid applicant data. The tool not only allows us to perform an in-depth analysis of the data, but it also provides strong and customizable reporting functions that allow the financial aid office to present results to other stakeholders in a meaningful way. The tool is almost like having a formal data analyst on staff."

"We have been using the ISIR Analysis Tool since it was created, and we consider it to be a valuable resource for analyzing data for the verification process," said Janet Roecker, Associate Director, Office of Student Financial Aid, University of Kansas. "The tool has enabled us to do some very in-depth analysis of the students we verify, thus giving us the information we need to focus on regarding the ISIR data elements that are most error-prone. The tool has definitely made our verification process much more efficient."

The ISIR tool was the first application of its kind within the Federal Student Aid organization because the FSA team selected a business intelligence strategy as the primary platform for developing the application. As is often the case in government, adapting to change was difficult, but the team stayed focused on developing a cutting-edge product.  

The government is not typically on the leading edge of innovation, so this application is the first of its kind supported by the Federal Student Aid organization. It brilliantly blends government processes with high tech business information technology. Its originality itself is exceptional within a bureaucratic environment.

Furthermore, the schools that use the ISIR Analysis Tool vary greatly in terms of how they approach discretionary verification and student outreach. Some schools select a high percentage of records for verification while others narrowly target a few students. Some small colleges help all of their students complete their initial FAFSA, while others have more modest student education efforts. Despite these differences, all schools can use the reports produced in the ISIR application to evaluate how efficiently their current practices correct any erroneous applicant information.  

Coordinating and collaborating with work units within the broader organization to purchase business intelligence software was the first challenge FSA faced in this process. The second challenge involved working with vendors and contract staff to configure and integrate the BI solution into the existing integrated technical architecture.

Currently, the team faces the ongoing challenge of keeping analytic capabilities in mind during the annual updating process. At times, the organization must ensure that the online student application site is ready to begin accepting applications on time, even when that means putting advancements to the ISIR tool on the back burner.  

The team didn't face overt resistance per se, but they found it surprisingly difficult to identify and isolate the appropriate technical staff to work on upgrading the IT infrastructure. No one wanted to assume the additional responsibility for this analytic product since the individuals involved already had full plates. Thankfully, Information Builders Consulting has been involved throughout the project, helping the team of five FSA employees with any performance issues and upgrades.

Achieved

The team's goal is to reach out to other work units within the organization and share the experiences they've encountered while developing a government application using a BI solution. The staff members hope to discover ways that they can leverage this technology to benefit the entire FSA organization and assist the enterprise in meeting performance goals and objectives.

End users have embraced this product fully. Their feedback indicates that they find the application to be innovative, and are surprised it is a government application. Despite this level of success, the team continues to hunts down new ways to grow the application and its users base using additional resources such as Active Reports.