Registrar David Tenney (left) works with IT’s Mir Mirhashimali (right) to improve the reporting aspects of the Cognos system.
“Every semester our office generates a Report to the President, which details enrollment and course information for that semester,” explained David Tenney, Registrar. “The report is based on census data, data captured on a unique and predetermined date each semester. The querying of data and the assembling of this report is, and has been, an extensive and time-consuming task. First as a ‘proof of concept’ and then as the pilot project, we worked with the Data Management team to utilize Cognos. The Cognos tool was user-friendly and very powerful, taking tasks that used to take us several days and enabling us to instead do those in hours. In a ‘geeky’ data sort of way, it’s been a fun project. Looking ahead we see numerous and exciting opportunities for future application.”