How Stetson University democratizes data-driven decision-making and debunks myths
Making sense of the massive amounts of data universities gather can be tricky, but it can also be helpful when it comes to definitively answering the most pressing questions facing educators and administrators today. What makes students stay at your university or apply to transfer? What leads to academic successes or struggles, and what are the early warning signs? How can you optimize your curriculum?
This is a real story of digital transformation.
Crunching the Numbers
For Dr. Resche Hines, finding answers to these questions took time—a lot of it. As the Assistant Vice President of Institutional Research and Effectiveness at Stetson University—a university located in DeLand, Florida, a cool 20 miles from Daytona Beach and 30 miles from downtown Orlando—Hines regularly interacts with data and reports from across the entire university. This could range from research to better understand the university’s 4,300 students or crunching the numbers for a new construction project.
Hines recognized the need to find a more scalable, user-friendly solution that could empower his university’s faculty and staff to conduct their own data-driven investigations and engage students and alumni with the most up-to-date information. For Hines, that meant implementing an interactive data visualization tool that helped him draw smarter insights from his institution’s data. That tool was Microsoft Power BI.
Now Stetson’s community is more engaged and more frequently turns to data instead of inherited wisdom and intuition to answer questions. Students and alumni feel more knowledgeable and connected to their campus with readily-digestible, interactive information. Faculty feel supported in their never-ending quest for better curricula and offerings for their students. And perhaps most importantly, Stetson University has enhanced its ability to conduct complex research, have more productive conversations, and debunk long-held institutional myths.
Empowering Employees
“There’s so much data out there that it becomes overwhelming for people to consume. Though you have data on every element you want about your life, there’s no way to easily use it,” explains Hines. “You can get it, but what are you going to do with it? Power BI has allowed us to transition that data to make it usable for the end user, to leverage it, and finally start looking at the data in a comprehensive way.”
Big data is often complex, which makes it difficult for researchers, faculty, staff, and administrators to understand. To encourage user adoption and explain to the Stetson community that Power BI would help alleviate challenges associated with data engagement, Hines and his team went to every school and department chair and personally demonstrated how the tool could be leveraged. Through this personal interaction with his community, Hines was able to directly empower the Stetson faculty and staff.
The easy-to-use platform even transformed critics into advocates. Today, faculty and staff at Stetson are using data to have better structured, more informed conversations about transforming curricula and classroom supplies. “We had a faculty member who was able to use Power BI to ask the Dean of their school for additional resources,” says Hines. “That’s when I knew we were on to something special.”
Click on the dashboard above to view an interactive enrollment report from Stetson University using Power BI.
Power BI has helped Hines debunk many long-held and potentially damaging institutional myths.
“There were some areas of the institution that I thought were pain points for us in terms of retaining students, but we’re actually doing very well in retaining students,” Hines explains. “I thought most of the data would tell us that STEM areas are pain points for any institution in retaining students. Our STEM areas here are out-retaining our general population, which was an amazing discovery. To see that through Power BI was definitely a myth buster for me and for the institution. It helps to change the conversation.”
Engaging Students and Alumni
For prospective, current, and former Stetson students, access to university information has improved dramatically. Federally required information such as enrollment trends, retention, and graduation data is more accessible than ever. Before Power BI, the university could make PDFs for people to download, but the data was static and complex. Students can now interact with and explore data online rather than being forced to download information.
Hines has even seen progress in Stetson’s alumni and stakeholder community. The university is in the early stages of developing a Power BI partnership with Stetson’s Alumni Gifting Program. Hines is currently working on a template to help them understand and leverage historical statistics about the program for the public. For every gifting program, they’ll be able to pull up data on the success of each campaign in progress and understand the intricacies of campaigning. The end goal is to help stakeholders and alumni see data points that have been previously difficult for them to see, such as the best time for email and calling campaigns or which days of the year are the biggest giving days.
Power BI has not only helped debunk myths and change the conversation at Stetson, it has also helped acknowledge students who often go unnoticed.
Click on the dashboard above to view an interactive retention report.
“Sometimes students outperform their scholarships, which were based on high school performance,” Hines says. “How do we track this and show student appreciation and reward them? Power BI helps us track these students and provide better incentives to show appreciation for their hard work.”
Microsoft is proud to partner with Resche Hines and Stetson University as they continue to engage students and empower faculty and administrators to achieve more.
Power BI teams up with Microsoft Teams
Have you seen the announcement about Microsoft Teams, the new chat-based workspace in Office 365? Check it out!
Groups in Power BI are built on Office 365 groups, too, so now you can add and interact with Power BI groups in your Microsoft Teams groups.
If you're an admin for a Power BI group, when you create a team in Microsoft Teams, the app suggests that you add Microsoft Teams functionality to your existing group.
In your Microsoft Teams channel, you just tap the + sign, then add Power BI as a tab in your channel.
Microsoft Teams automatically detects all the reports in your Power BI groups and in My Workspace. You can choose which ones to show in the Power BI tab in your channel.
Now your Power BI report is handsomely displayed in your Microsoft Teams channel.
If your team isn't taking advantage of groups in Power BI yet, now is a great time to try them. They're a great way to share your dashboards, reports, and datasets with your coworkers. Read more about groups in Power BI.
Then see how you can leverage your Power BI groups in Microsoft Teams!
August Power BI Desktop Update: Updated Drill experience
In the August update of Power BI Desktop, we released the general availability of inline hierarchies. Inline hierarchies let you explore your data as you drill down in the context of your hierarchies. As an example, imagine you were looking at your Sales Amount by Order Date.
You start out looking at each year, and now you want to see quarters as well. When you expand down using inline hierarchies, we will carry the parent category down so you can differentiate the sales in each quarter for each year.
The previous behavior for drill wouldn’t split out individual quarters by year. It would show sales in each quarter across all years.
In the August release of the Desktop, we took inline hierarchies out of preview, and replaced this previous drill experience with the inline hierarchy experience. Since that update, we have heard feedback from you that while this new experience is very useful, you still have a need for the older experience, especially when using drill with unrelated categories in the hierarchy.
We listened to your feedback, and today we are releasing an update to the August Power BI Desktop release that gives you the ability to use both of these experience in one chart. Once you install this update, you will see two buttons on a visual that has a hierarchy in the axis. The double down arrow icon (
) will do the previous experience of showing the next level of the hierarchy, and the split arrow icon (
) will perform the new inline hierarchy experience explained above. You will see this update in the Power BI web service as well.
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Why Smart Data is Behind Pokémon Go’s Success
It seems like Pokémon decided to accompany me through my whole life. I used to play with the cards when they first came out in the 90’s and now I’m thinking about the huge amounts of data the game is gathering and how they can be analyzed with smart data discovery solutions. Who would have thought that after so many years it would make such a comeback! Even though it is only officially available in three countries, Pokémon Go already beat WhatsApp, Instagram and Snapchat in time spent on the app, and is fighting with Twitter for daily active users. To what does it owe its success?
Most people think that Pokémon Go is so successful because it uses the Augmented Reality camera; but the truth is, it’s successful because it harnessed data into a game. Pokémon Go offers the chance to pretend the world is filled with Pokémon, which we can see through the AR camera of our smartphones. This creates a sense of co-presence. The Pokémon are found in the places that fit them better, for example, a water-type Pokémon will be found near fountains or beaches. But this is not thanks to the AR camera. The real sense of co-presence comes from the perfect placing of Pokémon. The makers of the app did this by taking smart data and turning it into a game.
There is a lot of personalization involved in the game which produces what looks like a seamless integration of the virtual and the real worlds. This makes it look like the game designers custom-placed each Pokémon. But the game can be played worldwide, and there is only one way to generate that level of personalized and localized information: a great usage of smart data.
Pokémon Go’s creators, Niantic, Inc., are Google Earth and Google Maps veterans. In 2012 they created another location-based game called Ingress, which was also a method of data collection and actually provided most of the data for Pokémon Go’s creation. Ingress was based on users capturing “portals”, which were historical sites and public areas that were determined as such by using Google Earth photos. Originally, the sites were chosen by Niantic, but they later encouraged users to submit their own recommendations for sites. About 15 million sites were suggested. The data behind these portals determined the location of “PokéStops” later on. Niantic used data from Google Earth, weather, urban planning, Google Maps, and the data generated by Ingress and its users to determine where each Pokémon should appear. This is why it feels so real.
Smart Data was not just the material for creating the game, it is also the result of it. The app is generating huge amounts of data about its users—mainly their location and movement patterns, but also has access to a lot of information in a person’s phone. All this data is great for business. Forbes wrote an article on the huge business potential generated by Pokémon Go. There are restaurants and shops that ended up with a “PokéStops” status and are taking full advantage of it by attracting app users and potential customers. Others that were not as lucky to be “PokéStops” can buy “lures” and attract Pokémon to their location, therefore attracting users. Since users want to use the Wi-Fi there, businesses can request for them to log in and gather a lot of data on customers. The challenge will be to be able to analyze the data generated and turn it into actionable insights. That’s when Business Intelligence and Smart Data Discovery solutions jump in.
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Pokémon Go spotted in Power BI publish to web
If you’ve missed hearing about it by now – although we’re not sure how you would – the new mobile game Pokémon Go was released this week by Niantic and The Pokémon Company, and it became an instant success. The game combines GPS location data, augmented reality, and the “gotta catch ‘em all” collectible fever of the original Pokémon games. Players wander around outside with their phones, hoping to find and capture rare monster spawns and battle other players for the right to claim virtual “gyms”.
Within days of its release, Pokémon Go became the top free app in both the Google Play store and the Apple App Store, surpassing favorites such as dating app Tinder and social media app Twitter. And now the latest craze has even been spotted in Power BI publish to web!
Earlier this week, a Power BI community member published their interactive report on the monsters featured in Pokémon Go. You can get an overview of all the monsters available, sort them by damage type, and see the relative power of each type. see it in full screen mode.
If you are one of the many people planning on playing some Pokémon Go this weekend, we wish you good weather and lots of rare monsters! (And for more unique examples of Power BI dashboards, check out the Data Stories Gallery.)
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Democratizing data—
Atkins goes digital by default with Office 365 E5
We’ve determined that we want Atkins to be “digital by default.” For me, that’s not just about using technology to bring people and information together, it’s about flexible experimentation at a rapid pace.
As an important part of our strategy, we’ve invested in the latest and most comprehensive version of Microsoft Office 365, the E5 suite, to give employees new ways to serve themselves and make faster, better decisions. Multiple benefits captured our attention, but I’m most eager to adopt Microsoft Power BI. We see it as the heart of our efforts to break down silos, unlock our core corporate data and enhance personal effectiveness.
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Atkins has a history of delivering innovative answers to complex engineering problems, from designing the world’s longest driverless subway in Dubai to transforming the offshore wind energy industry to international airport modernization. We’re infusing every part of our company with that same spirit of innovation, which is no small feat for a global organization. We’ve got to think about global collaboration and choose technology systems that work everywhere in the world, tools that make it easy for people to share information and connect with each other. We can’t take months to provide employees with new capabilities—we need to be able to get them up and running.
My colleagues want a 360-degree, single, integrated view of the business and the ability to consume that data proactively without waiting for another report to be created. Using Power BI, individual employees have self-service access to intelligence that they can slice and dice in whatever ways are most helpful to them. They also have an easy way to view and share their insights through interactive visualizations. I’m a great believer in democratized capabilities across the organization, and enabling employees to access and experiment with data ties directly to our emphasis on innovation.
Increasing our ability to be data driven also helps us act faster by taking advantage of existing resources and expertise. Giving our entire workforce access to Power BI unlocks the full potential of the whole company and helps enable the agile new world we’re creating.
There are many other aspects of Office 365 that help us move faster and give us the business agility we’re looking for. For example, we use our Yammer enterprise social network to crowdsource solutions to client issues, come up with ideas for hackathons and engage diverse groups in conversations about using innovative technology to create value for our employees and clients alike.
Also, through E5, we’re extending our use of Skype for Business, making it our single solution for voice, video, conferencing and instant messaging. Moving to complete cloud-based communications gives us obvious benefits in terms of cost savings and less equipment on people’s desks. Plus, we’ll continue to gain benefits as Microsoft adds new features to the platform over time. There’s also real value in using the full capabilities of Skype for Business because it supports true mobility. Atkins has many consultants who spend a lot of time on the road. They love using Skype for Business to stay productive and effective wherever they might be in the world.
In fact, Office 365 will have a transformational impact on the way all sorts of employees work at Atkins—they no longer need to be at a desk or even in an office. They go to Office 365 to connect with colleagues and clients and bring new insights to the work we do. They tap into our innovation hubs, client communities, winning work communities and business change leaders network. And they use Microsoft SharePoint Online to set up team sites quickly for collaboration across borders, and they share information with Microsoft OneDrive for Business.
Our vision is to move the company completely to the cloud by 2020, allowing us to decommission on-premises infrastructure and concentrate our creative energy in the spaces where we can truly differentiate Atkins from the rest of the market. Using Office 365 helps us harness our collective knowledge and experience, combine it with some of our clients’ knowledge and experience, and develop innovative, successful solutions in a fraction of the time it would have taken before. I’m excited about the future at Atkins and our relationship with Microsoft and Office 365. We look forward to the ongoing benefits of using a product that’s continually evolving and adding value to what we do, just like we do for our clients.
Managed Solution is a full-service technology firm that empowers business by delivering, maintaining and forecasting the technologies they’ll need to stay competitive in their market place. Founded in 2002, the company quickly grew into a market leader and is recognized as one of the fastest growing IT Companies in Southern California.
We specialize in providing full Microsoft solutions to businesses of every size, industry, and need.
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3 ways Power BI can help your sales team succeed
With an ever-evolving market and a massive amount of data available, your sales team’s job of knowing their customer base isn’t easy. A multitude of information streams in every day. Sorting through data sets, spreadsheets and a dozen apps can slow them down—hindering the growth and success of your company. In fact, 90 percent of sales reps associate missed opportunities with the inability to leverage all available information.
Instead of solely focusing on dissecting the customer data in front of them, sales reps should be looking to data visualization to pull out insights not apparent at first glance. Microsoft Power BI in Office 365 can help by enabling your sales reps to collect, unify and visualize all their data in one place. It’s cloud-based and compatible with 59 different applications, which simplifies the process.
Here are three ways data visualization can transform your sales process:
1. Instant reports—Companies are always trying to find new ways to increase productivity. For a sales team, that can mean eliminating difficult and time-consuming manual reports and replacing them with a technology partner that can sort through data from myriad sources and produce actionable insights. Pipeline reports and sales trends can be generated in hours, minutes and sometimes seconds—instead of days—leaving you plenty of extra time to review and develop thoughtful strategies.
2. Data share across departments—For your sales team to succeed, your company’s other departments also need analytical success. Because Power BI supports nearly 60 applications, different departments can import the data they’ve collected to share with each other and provide deeper insight. When a sales team can see where marketing efforts have succeeded, for example, they can more effectively realign their strategies.
3. Quota management—In an ever-changing market, setting realistic quotas proves challenging, especially when your sales success depends on variables like region, month and customer segment. Power BI eliminates the difficulty by gathering past and present data—in one place—so you can set attainable goals for the future.
Your sales team already knows how to close a deal. Help them get there faster with the insights gained through data visualization.
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