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data strategy

Tips for Moving to Near-Real-Time Data in Higher Education

Learning to work with daily or real-time data feels like learning to drink from a firehose. As more universities and colleges move to having near-real-time data, we offer these helpful tips.

The Data Only Updates 3x Per Year?

Snapshots can also be helpful with enrolment forecasting – in particular, many users I speak to don’t want their forecast to change daily, instead every second week or even every month.

Why Version Control Matters to Enrolment Forecasters

Enrolment forecasts are often large and complex models, involving information from databases, models, spreadsheets, and several other places. These models often involve thousands of lines of code and there are many opportunities for human error. I recommend using software to support versioning.

Using a Database for your Enrolment Forecast

Databases are great at storing the inputs and outputs of your enrolment forecast. Depending on your configuration, horsepower, and forecast design however, they may be very subpar for the steps that happen between input and output.

Two decades of data wrangling, and I’m still learning new things

Many institutions we work with struggle with the subscription models employed by many software vendors. Each time you onboard new staff, there is an added license cost that you didn’t plan for in your budget. But with FME, the cost of adding new staff to the platform is exactly zero.