The Business Intelligence team, with new Director Sean Preusse (fourth from right).
As a society, we have access to more data than ever before. Sometimes it is hard to know what it means and what to do with it all.
Here at Macquarie, the need to analyse and understand the numbers is imperative to our function, informs our operations and ultimately impacts how we attract researchers and students.
But where does that information come from? Meet the team behind this important science and find out how they can help you in your everyday job.
Who are you?
We are the Business Intelligence and Reporting (BIR) team – previously known as Strategic Planning and Information (SPI). Essentially, we are a data-savvy team of 11 with a new director, Sean Preusse, who joined our team in August. You can find us on Level 5 of the Australian Hearing Hub.
What do you do?
The short answer? We work with data, of course! Whether we are collecting it, analysing it, reporting it, defining it, generating actionable insights from it, or strategically planning around it, data is at the core of everything we do.
The not-so-short answer? Our work within Macquarie revolves around five core functions:
Business intelligence and analytics
Our team analyses quantitative and qualitative data and provides this to the University community for accurate information, improved decision-making, and easier collaboration.
Load monitoring, forecasting, and insights
We collect and analyse information, and provide insights on trends and potential issues, to help the University Executive strategically plan for the future.
Statutory reporting
Our team is responsible for data collection on enrolments, student load, courses, unit of study completions, course completions, applications, HECS-HELP, FEE-HELP and OS-HELP.
Not only do we manage mandatory reporting requirements, we also provide calculated advice and assistance to the University community to ensure Macquarie is meeting its reporting requirements.
Surveys
We manage and analyse data from the federal governments’ QILT surveys (Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching)and other institutional surveys to develop reports that support major planning and quality improvement processes of the University. We also provide insights and trend analyses to compare our student experience and graduate outcomes against other universities.
University rankings
We prepare and submit data to relevant institutional rankings organisations such as Times Higher Education (THE) and Quacquarelli Symonds (QS). We are also involved in the University’s rankings strategy development and the provision of related data and analysis.
Above all, the service we provide supports the entire Macquarie community.
Why do you do it?
We believe strongly in making Macquarie University the best it can be – this means providing independent, unbiased information and insights to reflect how Macquarie is performing now, and to facilitate improvement for the future.
Who do you most frequently work with?
Absolutely everyone! We work with (and for) the entire University community so we get to work with a lot of incredible people including University Executive, members from every faculty and office, all divisions, and external stakeholders, including the state and federal government.
What’s a recent achievement you’re proud of?
In January this year, our team created a dashboard about offers and enrolments which has over 5500 views already! This makes us so proud because it means we have presented the data in a way that people can interact with and gain insights from to make Macquarie University the best it can be. When it comes to data visualisation, our ethos is ‘less is always more’. By keeping dashboards clean, more insight can be gained. Want to know more about presenting your data? Then don’t miss our ‘Data Storytelling’ presentation on Monday, 18 November. Email us for more information.
We also moved our load forecasting model to an interactive platform called Calumo which makes it much easier for users to understand and interact with the data in more meaningful ways.
As of this year, we host a Business Intelligence Community of Practice (CoP) for attendees across Macquarie every month. This allows us to better service the University community by asking how data is used and how the data service can be improved. We also use this space to showcase our projects and dashboards, to allow other teams to showcase theirs, and occasionally to invite external experts to present, in order to make data insights accessible to everyone.
What’s planned for the future? Anything exciting on the horizon?
Planning for the future is in our job description! So, we always have many exciting projects on the horizon to make Macquarie even better. Currently, our largest and most ambitious project is creating a Data Warehouse in a cloud-based environment to store and govern all the data that the University captures. This is a first for Macquarie and will facilitate a much more seamless data service. Not only will it make operations more efficient by generating a single source of truth for all information, but it will allow the University to wield greater control over data and how it is used.
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