How staff can engage with business intelligence

Hannah Coutts
Thursday 30 September 2021

The business intelligence (BI) team recently met with Bethany, Mark, and Andrew from the business relationship management (BRM) team to discuss the BI services they provide. The next steps is to promote the use of dashboards more widely to the University community and engage directly with dashboard users to improve existing services.

 

What is business intelligence (BI)?  

The business intelligence team works with data owners and users across the University to present data in interactive reports called dashboards and static documents such as pdfs.

Dashboards let users find the information they need without needing access to IT systems such as SITS, ResourceLink and Aptos. 

Read more about this on our web pages. 

 

What BI services are offered at the University? 

If you’re not already using our services, we have dashboards providing information from HR, Finance, and Student data sources (as well as others) so there’s a good chance we have something that’s useful to you. 

Visit the dashboard catalogue to see the BI dashboards you have access to. Sign in to the VPN first if you’re off-campus. 

Visit the dashboard catalogue page

There’s also a list of all our current dashboards on the BI web pages. 

List of dashboards

Email [email protected] to ask for access to a dashboard. These requests will go through dashboard owners/approvers. 

Our Dashboard Catalogue, displaying a number of Student, Finance, Estates and HR dashboards:  

Each icon on the BI Dashboard Catalogue (sometimes called the Access Point) leads to a specially created dashboard containing a number of sections (like pages) with charts and tables designed for staff to access specific data. 

Improving what we do by engaging with our users 

As we mainly communicate with dashboard owners, we rarely get a chance to talk directly to users and find out what improvements we could make for them, or what kinds of training would be useful. 

We’re always happy to receive feedback at [email protected] 

The BI dashboards are designed in-house which means we can add custom tweaks to a dashboard if enough users would find it helpful. 

Amongst other excellent suggestions, the Business Relationship Management (BRM) team suggested that we start blogging about the BI dashboards and run some sessions where we ask users for direct feedback on the dashboards. 

 

Register interest in a feedback session 

We’re looking forward to announcing a feedback session soon! If you would like to register interest or if anything you’d like to say to us springs to mind, drop us an email. 

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