Florida State University Saves Time, Money with Analytics Tool

Before Florida State University (FSU) switched to a new analytics program, administrators had to spend a lot of time learning how to use their business intelligence tools. With multiple third-party vendors and legacy tools, the approximately 6,000 employees who interact with the system had trouble producing accurate and timely reports on information from PeopleSoft Enterprise applications.

“The tools weren’t very intuitive, and they had a long lead time to develop changes to those reports," said Michael Barrett, associate vice president and chief information officer at the university. "So it was a mix of using them and also deploying them that was a problem.”

But since the university switched to Oracle's Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Plus, it doesn't have that problem anymore. By consolidating its existing systems, FSU saved about $360,000 in license and maintenance fees, not to mention infrastructure and administrative support costs.

Now the university IT staff focuses on supporting one product instead of being spread across several products. And the 1,500 employees who access the system on a regular basis produce reports without much help from IT staff.

“They don’t have to wait for our resources to develop what they need,” Barrett said.

Because the tool is intuitive and easy to use, the support staff doesn't have to spend as much time training people how to use it.  And instead of spending a month compiling federal and statutory reports, the research department teams spend about a week on them. With the new reporting tool, some departments have streamlined their human resources processes by 50 percent.

For the first phase of the project, employees have access to 26 dashboards in 13 subject areas. The people who have the security clearance needed to access the dashboards pull information whenever they need it in whatever format they choose.

"Now if they want the data in more summary format or if they want a chart or if they want more details, they can just click on a button in the dashboard," Barrett said, "and it will give it to them anyway they want.”