North Iowa Area Community College (NIACC) is deploying Entrinsik Informer as its new reporting solution to allow end users to create and run their own reports, and leverage dashboard creation and data analysis capabilities.
NIACC had been using Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) since migrating its Ellucian Colleague system to SQL in 2007. The college’s Technology Services department was responsible for creating and deploying views of specific data from its Colleague database, and end users had to teach themselves to use SSRS in order to run reports against these pre-configured views.
“End users could only access the data given to them in the pre-configured views, and any changes or additional data access would have to be requested, requiring Technology Services to modify individual views and redeploy them, meaning hours or days before users could have the data they needed to run reports,” explained Greg Bailey, NIACC’s director of enterprise applications.
In evaluating new solutions, NIACC sought to implement a reporting solution that could be set up to easily answer questions as they arise; have the ability to join tables and views in the background giving the end user access to more data with less reliance on technology services; rollout reporting to a wider audience with an intuitive point-and-click solution; leverage interactive dashboards for decision making; and take advantage of reporting, analytics, automation, dashboards, and other data analysis capabilities to aid NIACC with decision-making.
NIACC is migrating all offices to Informer. Six offices have been fully migrated so far and more users being added about every two weeks, without the need for lengthy training or technical expertise.
“Informer is very intuitive and easy to train end users to either run reports or build their own, said Bailey. “Building the metadata is a breeze and we build what we need as we need it. It is easy to get started and grow from there. The college is pretty excited with what we’ve been able to deliver so far with Informer.”
For more information, go to www.entrinsik.com.