New Jersey City University Implements Interactive Enrollment Dashboards with SpreadsheetWEB, Pagos’ Cloud Based Data Visualization Software
The Challenge
New Jersey City University (NJCU, est. 1929) is located on a 46 acre, urban campus in bustling Jersey City. With one of the most diverse enrollments in the U.S., its 2011 enrollment consists of more than 6,500 undergraduate students, nearly 1,700 graduate students and almost 400 continuing education students.
NJCU has an all encompassing mission statement: “To provide a diverse population with an excellent university education. NJCU is committed to the improvement of the educational, intellectual, cultural, socio-economic, and physical environment of the surrounding urban region and beyond.” With such a challenging goal, and given the crunch put on the education system by the withdrawal of federal financial support, the ability to make rapid, educated decisions is vital to the success and growth of such a venture.
Fortunately, the office of Enrollment Management had been collecting an extensive amount of raw data, in spreadsheet files. This wealth of data, regarding the admission, enrollment and academic programs, was collected over a decade, categorized by semester and student types.
With 41 Undergraduate programs, 27 Graduate programs, and a 2012 fiscal budget of over $170 Million to manage, a flexible tool was needed, to analyze the data and turn it into interactive dashboards that could be made available to members of the University community. In addition, realtime filtering of the data was essential to provide up-to-the-minute, cumulative results. Charts and graphs were also required for visual representation of data.
The exact calculation of informative indicators, such as retention rates, would also be necessary, given the nature of the business and the decision drivers.
The Solution
Pagos provided the technology and services to transform NJCU’s raw data into interactive web based dashboards, available in real time to the staff at NJCU. These dashboards were designed in Microsoft Excel, giving NJCU staff transparency and access to data, calculations, and visualizations in real time. Anybody with basic Excel expertise that was given clearance could review and, if needed, update those reports.
Pagos also implemented the SpreadsheetWEB Cloud Environment to NJCU, allowing the workbooks to be published on a web environment and thus share them as web based dashboards.
The Results
The Pagos team designed and implemented the dashboards with an efficient and user-friendly interface. NJCU staff were able to immediately access the dashboards for use in planning, monitoring and analyzing data in order to make informed decisions in real time with full buy-in from all parties concerned. One of the most impressive factors of the implementation process was that the Pagos team was able to deliver the required dashboards with a rapid turnaround time.
The Dashboards were deployed on Pagos’ cloud platform, without the need for infrastructure or technical support from NJCU staff or their IT department.
“There is an absolute need in today’s data-rich world to provide information as efficiently as possible. One truly efficient way to do this is by providing people with busy schedules with intuitive, easily understood matrices and dashboards. Pagos provided the technology and business support solution that allowed us to share information in a way that made sense to our higher education community. The ease of accessing and using the data encouraged its inclusion in the informed-decision making process.”
