Lone Star College System Selects ZogoTech™ for Data Warehousing and Reporting
Accurate source for data brings five colleges together through one single system
December 16, 2009 (Dallas, TX)—ZogoTech™, a leading provider of data warehousing and business intelligence software for higher education, announced today that it has completed the integration of its software at Lone Star College System – the third largest community college system in Texas. By seamlessly merging with Lone Star’s current enterprise resource planning system, the college will be able to quickly and easily report the data required for its Achieving the Dream status – a grant from the Lumina Foundation to help underserved, under prepared students.
“Since we are such a large system of five distinct colleges and a college office, we had six different versions of the truth. It was hard to get data out of our ERP system and people would get the data in different ways with different definitions of calculations,” says Siobahn Fleming, associate vice chancellor for institutional research.
The goal of Fleming and her team was to bring together a multitude of data warehouses that had been built by the various colleges into one single data warehouse. Until this point, the data from these various sources was hard to reach and often required computer programming – skills not typically required of institutional researchers.
ZogoTech worked closely with the institutional research team to integrate three software modules. Ease of reporting and data accuracy were instant benefits of the research intelligence module. Through the executive intelligence module, key performance indicators can also be automatically calculated, such as cohorts and stop-outs, so that progress and problems among various types of student groups can be easily identified. Administrators can also build in at-risk indicators, identifying students who are at risk of dropping out or failing, part of the enterprise software’s student engagement module.
“What I liked about ZogoTech was that it looked familiar – especially the pivot tables’ layout – and it looked like something that people could quickly figure out,” says Fleming. “In the past, only two or three people could even do the reporting. Now the IR team can open, click and drag, and all the while, we’re all using the same data.”
Time-Savings
A big advantage to the team was the time saved. According to Fleming, it was often quicker to manually pull data rather than create the programming it took to extract data from the college’s old main data warehouse. It was not intuitive and often took take days to create programming to run a report.
Lone Star College must report specific information to the state of Texas, and ZogoTech’s solution makes this once arduous task an easy one by tracking standard enrollment in a click-and-drag style of reporting mechanism. In addition, Lone Star uses the ad hoc reporting tool to quickly run ‘what if’ scenarios in just a few seconds.
“That’s a big deal now, as are our accountability measures to the state to see if we are meeting our outcomes,” says Fleming. “When we ask questions like ‘Are our developmental students learning the outcomes and how does it affect them later on?’, then we can quickly get the answer.”
More Efficiency and Better Decision-Making
Fleming also used the implementation of ZogoTech’s data warehousing solution as a catalyst for bringing a disparate team together in collaboration.
“Where we were five colleges before, now we are one system. Now that we’re all using the same data, we’re all learning together,” explains Fleming. “The consistency leads to more confidence in the data. When six different groups come up with the same number, this gives more reliability and validity to our results. It’s the nature of higher education to question everything, but now we have one data source and one set of reality.”
ZogoTech President Michael Taft says, “The Lone Star College System is a great example of collaboration. By creating this reality for schools, they can focus their time and attention on research and analysis. Our goal is to help them easily get to the data and have confidence in the numbers so that, as analysts and researchers, they can make a greater impact for their institution.”
About Lone Star College System
Lone Star College System consists of five colleges including LSC-CyFair, LSC-Kingwood, LSC-Montgomery, LSC-North Harris, and LSC-Tomball, six centers, LSC-University Center, LSC-University Park, Lone Star Corporate College, and LSC-Online. With more than 59,000 students in credit classes, LSCS is the largest institution of higher education in the Houston area and third largest community college system in Texas. To learn more visit LoneStar.edu.
About ZogoTech
The aims of ZogoTech are nothing short of revolutionizing the way that educators and administrators use technology. ZogoTech’s Institutional Intelligence software has been built through partnerships with institutions of higher education to deliver a solution that precisely answers the data needs of executives, institutional researchers, faculty and student services personnel. ZogoTech brings an in-depth knowledge of higher education, superior customer support, and software solutions highly-acclaimed for their usability. See ZogoTech.com for more information.
Contact Information
- Cassandra Johnson
- Marketing/PR Manager
- cjohnson@zogotech.com
- (888) 221-6372 ext. 807