How Important is Business Intelligence for Education?

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Providing quality education and running schools as a business are becoming more demanding these days. To maintain the efficiency and effectiveness of K-12 education, schools should really invest in reliable business intelligence tools.

Armed with the right BI tools that focus on several key performance indicators, they will be able to run the school well, as a business, and provide the necessary educational resources to those who depend on them for knowledge.

There is a lingering problem across the world wherein school administrators are expected to make magic with as little funding as possible. Usually, more funding is provided to facilities that deliver exemplary results in terms of student performance.

This is why the school board should monitor KPI metrics that will help them manage their operations and ensure that they provide the best educational resources to the students attending their facility. In doing so, they can generate the kind of performance that will generate them much needed financial support to continuously improve their offerings.

Information relating to school fees, student population, daily attendance, class sizes, program offerings, academic results, and the like are all essential key performance indicators. And with heavier competition to attract new students and supporters, a reliable performance dashboard becomes all the more necessary.

Part of the requirements of the school’s administration is to provide all stakeholders with regular reports. This is because the latter wants to see whether or not funding is being used effectively. If a school doesn’t perform then it might be better for another facility, one that’s performing, to receive the additional support.

The problem is that these reports can be quite lengthy. This being said, manual data collection and assessment is a task that is simply too tedious for the administrators to engage in. It uses a substantial amount of resources that will be more useful when applied to other aspects of school operations.

With the help of BI tools like a performance dashboard, school administrators can easily reduce the amount of work that goes into churning out reports and actually deliver better quality data reports to their stakeholders as often as requested.

Apart from this, they will also have data on hand that will let them know where they currently stand and what aspects of their K-12 education provision require work and enhancement. At a glance, they’ll have charts and graphs that can easily be understood allowing the board to make strategic decisions that will benefit all staff members and students.

But aside from educational facilities that are government-run, private facilities also require customized BI tools. In their case, it is the excessive amount of funding that becomes problematic. With millions on hand, running the school can become quite complex.

In both situations, apart from meeting constant reporting requirements faster, school administrators are also able to make decisions backed by data and the sense of active accountability is enhanced in the process. With information that is easy to understand, educators have the ability to plan, strategize, and leverage important trends to meet their objectives.

When it comes to the student experience, a reliable dashboard can help the school board assess everything from trends in student performance to the subjects they prefer taking. Retention, academic results, and even class satisfaction are key performance indicators that can be measured.

Educators can also track their students’ progress and compare these with data from other schools. Using these details, they can then make decisions to improve their operations and enhance the quality of K-12 education that they provide.

Apart from tracking the students, educators can also use BI tools to monitor the effectiveness and efficiency of the administration. From investments in contracted services to enrollment levels and such, the most recent data for all of these can be made available with a few clicks.

Using the same dashboard, they can also assess KPI metrics that will inform them of gains, expenses, and any budget issues that the facility might be experiencing.

As these pieces of information present, you can see just how important business intelligence tools can be for the education sector. They are not there just to help the facility itself but all of the people working there and the students as well as stakeholders that are being serviced.

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