Villanova University is a private Catholic high research activity (R2) doctoral institution serving approximately 11,000 undergraduate, graduate, and law students. Over time, dissatisfaction built among business users, college deans, and senior administrators around the lack of easy and timely access to data for decision-making. To solve this problem, the Provost created the Office of Decision Support and Data Integrity (ODSDI) charged with advancing a culture of data sharing, data stewardship and data-informed decision-making. Central to this work was the creation of a strong and sustainable data infrastructure and enhanced data governance along with building an operational framework that would maximize ROI for the university’s initiatives.
Read the case study to learn how Villanova partnered with HelioCampus to build an institutional analytics platform and help Villanova create a campus wide data analytics strategy, developing four best practices for success along the way.
“HelioCampus set up the entire environment—the data lake, ETL layer, Tableau data visualization environment, student data models that included admissions, course registration, and the entire student lifecycle was all designed for us. This jumpstart to our admissions, financial aid, course registrations, and student outcomes data was invaluable. If we had taken on that aspect of the project internally, it would have taken us years.”
Trina Das, Assistant Vice Provost
Villanova University
The exploration of Villanova’s data tools and reporting challenges made it clear that the university lacked a holistic view of data. Das pinpointed several specific challenges, including:
During the process of developing Villanova’s data strategy, Das identified four best practices that she believes were the keys to their success. Read the case study for more details on each one:
