Data Discords
A contested number in a board meeting, with someone saying that is not our number, and nobody can resolve it in the room, if at all.
INSTITUTIONAL RESEARCH, ANALYTICS, & DECISION SUPPORT
Actionable Insights to Drive Positive Outcomes
Real-time institutional research, analytics, and decision support platform designed to deliver value and insights on day one.
CHALLENGE
Turning Insight into Actions
The demographic cliff is affecting all institutions and requires a different approach and a different set of tools to win. Increasingly, boards and individual departments are demanding real-time decision-making support that is both accurate and verifiable. At the same time, IT teams struggle as critical institutional data leaves their control, creating more rigorous compliance challenges.
Common Concerns Facing Institutional Leaders
Declining Enrollment
An enrollment decline that no one can attribute to specific factors or has conflicting or unclear data.
Limited Insights
Decisions made on program launches or closures with no evidence driving the decision.
Regulatory Filings
Accreditation or federal filings completed in isolation, where the same figures are not defensible or traceable across multiple submissions.
Data Validation
A new provost or president joins and does not trust the numbers they inherited, when their sources and validity cannot be verified.
Security
A CIO or CISO concerned about data residing with multiple outside SaaS providers, increasing the surface area for a data breach.
SOLUTIONS/FEATURES
On-Demand Real-Time Decision Support
OculusIT’s Institutional Research and Analytics platform solves for these challenges and more. By delivering real-time, fully verifiable and traceable data, we increase decision-making velocity, accuracy, and continuity. And by delivering the solution on-premises, we eliminate data processing agreements, breach-notification negotiations, vendor-held PII, and much more.
Roll Based Access
21 prebuilt personas designed to give each user the information most actionable for them to increase decision-making velocity.
Unlimited Data Sources
IPEDS and other public datasets built in, with an ability to add an unlimited number of other owned or subscribed data sources.
Data Audit Trail
Every data point has an audit trail, and any dashboard numbers can be quickly reconciled to an immutable and sharable URL.
Verifiability Answers
The platform only answers what it cannot support, eliminating false or misleading data from entering the decision-making process.
Benchmarking
Ability to benchmark across institutional and public peer data, including health, finances, enrollment, workforce, peer benchmarks, and more.
Data Control and Governance
100% on-prem deployment giving complete control of the data to ensure data sovereignty and availability.
Intuitive Natural-Language Queries
Ask questions like you would to a trusted colleague and receive answers that are guard-railed, verifiable, and auditable.
Historical Tracking
Complete history of the data presented, actions taken, and outcomes achieved, to understand what changed and why.
Frequently asked questions
What is the OculusIT Institutional Research and Analytics platform?
The platform provides higher education leaders with real-time access to institutional research, analytics, benchmarking, and decision support within a single, governed environment. It combines public higher education data with an institution’s own data, while maintaining a complete record of where every number came from and how it was calculated.
How is this different from a traditional BI or dashboard platform?
Traditional BI tools are designed to display data. The OculusIT platform is designed to support decisions. It combines role-based analytics, peer benchmarking, natural-language questions, data provenance, decision history, and governance so users can understand not only what a number is, but where it came from, what it means, and how it has been used.
Does institutional data leave our environment?
No. The platform is deployed on-premises and runs on the institution’s own databases. Institutional data, including PII, remains under the institution’s control rather than being transferred to or stored by an outside analytics provider.
Who is the platform designed for?
The platform includes 21 prebuilt role-based experiences, from presidents, boards, provosts, CFOs, and enrollment leaders to Institutional Research, registrars, HR, advancement, and IT. Each role sees the information most relevant to the decisions they are responsible for, without having to work through data designed for someone else.
What data can the platform use?
The platform incorporates federal and other public higher education datasets covering more than 5,800 US institutions out of the box, as well as an institution’s own systems and third-party data, with prebuilt integrations for most platforms. This allows public benchmarks, peer data, labor-market information, enrollment, financial, academic, workforce, and other institutional measures to be analyzed together. Platforms supported include, but are not limited to, Element451, Ellucian Banner ERP, Ellucian Colleague, Ellucian Degree Works, Slate CRM, Jenzabar One, Workday Student, Oracle PeopleSoft Campus Solutions, Anthology Student (SIS), Salesforce Education Cloud, Encoura Reach (formerly Anthology Reach), Evisions Argos, Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, Canvas LMS, Blackboard Learn, Moodle, D2L Brightspace, PowerFAIDS, and Ellucian Student Financial Success (formerly CampusLogic).
Can we use the platform before connecting our institutional systems?
Yes. An institution can begin with its own public data and peer benchmarks before connecting to its SIS, CRM, LMS, finance, HR, or other institutional system. Additional data sources can then be added as the institution seeks to expand the range of questions the platform can answer.
Can users ask questions in plain English?
Yes. Users can ask questions as they would to a trusted colleague. The difference is that answers are constrained to governed data and approved analytical methods rather than allowing an AI system to generate unsupported queries or conclusions.
What happens if the platform cannot support an answer?
It says so. If the required data is unavailable or an answer cannot be verified, the platform will not generate a number or chart solely to provide a response. It identifies what is missing, helping prevent unsupported information from entering the decision-making process.
How can we verify the numbers presented in a dashboard or report?
Every figure carries an audit trail that identifies its source and the rules used to produce it. Users can reconcile a number to the underlying data, including the records used, the records excluded, and the transformations applied, and share that reconciliation when a number is challenged.
How does the platform help preserve institutional knowledge over time?
The platform maintains more than historical data. Its decision journal records the information presented, the rationale behind a decision, expected outcomes, and what ultimately happened. That creates an institutional record that remains available as presidents, provosts, board members, and other leaders change.