USF fosters a culture of data-driven decision-making, empowering employees to derive insights in minutes using Power BI

Institutions of higher learning are embracing the use of data in navigating the modern education landscape. However, creating a data-driven decision-making culture is not a simple task. From forecasting enrollment to financial planning, data and analytics influence all areas of a university’s operations. The University of South Florida (USF) set out to equip its departments and colleges with the right tools to derive business insights from disparate data sources.

USF took the first step in a major transformation by using Azure Synapse Analytics to deliver analytics for financial reporting. The university aimed to give its teams advanced, intuitive data tools that could use its existing infrastructure on Microsoft Azure, maximizing its budget. To further support this goal, USF rolled out data literacy training. This empowers its employees to become self-sufficient “client technologists”—users with the technical expertise to apply analytics to business data using the available tools. “We are shifting toward an operational model that supports client technologists,” says Jenny Paulsen, Deputy Chief Information Officer of USF. “The decision to use Microsoft was key in this journey.”

Transitioning away from manual data collection to reduce administrative work

Founded in 1956, USF serves approximately 50,000 students and 15,000 faculty and staff on campuses in Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Sarasota-Manatee. A commitment to student success and high-impact research has propelled USF to become one of the nation’s top 50 public universities, including its highest ranking ever by U.S. News & World Report at number 42 in 2023. USF also received the Preeminent Research University designation from the Florida Board of Governors, the highest designation a state university can earn. As a major academic institution, USF wanted to empower its community members to ground decisions in authoritative data. “Data-driven decision-making is really critical to the success of universities,” says Paulsen.

The university saw financial reporting as an area that could benefit from better insights and enhanced efficiency. Although its homegrown financial reporting tools were functional, its teams had to crunch numbers and compile information manually from multiple spreadsheets to produce reports. That administrative workload took valuable time away from other projects, including analysis, and often meant weekend work. “Our system was broken, but we didn’t know it,” says Jennifer Condon, Vice President and Deputy Chief Financial Officer of USF.

Connecting an increasing number of data sources to Power BI to produce reports in minutes

USF set out to build a resilient infrastructure, promote data literacy through training and professional development, and support the ability of its client technologists to generate insights themselves. The university adjusted its approach, enhancing its data and analytics toolkits to a self-service model and enabling its teams to pull and analyze information themselves. “It’s a subtle shift in higher education and, more importantly, at USF,” says Condon. “We’re moving toward a model in which we offer the tools for people to control their own destinies.” This approach also supports broader goals for driving efficiency across university departments.

The finance team is also improving its efficiency by using Microsoft Power BI. Previously, an employee in the athletics department with a financial question would have to reach out to a financial analyst and wait for a response. Now, someone in athletics can simply load the data sets using Power BI and make a decision in minutes instead of days. The ability to load the necessary data from one trusted source saves time and refocuses teams’ energy on analytics and actions that benefit students and staff. “The Athletics CFO is one of the biggest fans of what we’ve done with financial analytics,” says Condon. “She says it’s been life-changing.”

USF engaged a Microsoft Unified Support team for a Designated Support Engineer who provides guidance on architectural best practices to build out these solutions. “The partnership between USF and Microsoft was key to the success of implementing the new analytics strategy using Azure and Power BI,” says Paulsen. “The Microsoft Dedicated Support Engineer was instrumental in helping us establish the infrastructure and the architecture and make best-practice design decisions.”

The university’s IT team also began certifying the data sets, which involves confirming that content meets USF’s quality standards for being reliable and authoritative. “Checks and balances have been put into place so that our employees can be confident that the data in their reports is of high quality and their access is secure,” says Paulsen.

Transforming organizational culture by cultivating data literacy across departments

In addition to providing efficient tools, USF wanted to empower its teams with the skills needed to derive valuable insights themselves. “Just giving our teams data was not necessarily going to lead to the best outcomes,” says Paulsen. “We recognized that we had to teach our teams how to use these analytics tools and data sets so that they could become data literate.” 

USF created a data literacy training program, curating content from a variety of sources, including Microsoft Learn, and encouraged client technologists across the institution to embark on this learning journey. “Transforming the culture to be more data driven and helping clients be more self-sufficient in their analytics has freed up the IT team to focus on delivering the data sets and placed the report creation and analysis in the hands of the client technologists,” says Paulsen.

Advancing digital transformation with self-service analytics

By preparing client technologists to do self-service analysis, USF has taken an important step on its ambitious digital transformation journey. “Because of the way it organically implemented itself across USF, I think our analytics project has truly been a smashing success,” says Condon. “We don’t hear any bad things about this system.”

Now the university is confident that it can advance its strategy of enhancing education through technology. “From an analytics perspective, we’re able to use data to make progress toward our goals and empower that data-driven decision-making,” says Paulsen. “We’re well poised to support the institution’s goals and strategic metrics.”