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Education IT, Government Analytics

Analytics to improve Singapore university’s ranking

By Kelly Ng | 30 December 2010

National University of Singapore is collaborating with SAP to develop a strategic solution that will better measure and assess its research performance, CIO Tommy Hor told FutureGov Asia Pacific.

“Business analytics has taken centre stage at our university, with increasing focus on tracking, managing, and enhancing research performance and capabilities,” said Hor.

“By enabling intuitive access to information such as project expenses, timeline and cash flow, our researchers can spend their valuable time and energy on innovation, accelerating research findings and publishing, which would further improve our university’s ranking.”

NUS, a research-intensive higher education institute, is measured by a number of outputs, such as number of publications, number of patents filed, knowledge transfer to the market, student-faculty ratio and the number of graduating students.

Three to four years ago, measuring data was difficult because it was inconsistent, Hor said.

A team from the university embarked on a project to create a single source of truth for all the data that was being collected, initially by standardising definitions, such as cash flow, financial year and full time.

“Business analytics solutions from SAP equip decision makers with one-stop access to insights and the ability to draw a correlation from disparate data sources which would otherwise remain isolated.”

Tracking performance is critical to NUS. “Say our target for annual contribution from our alumni members is five per cent of the total giving. How do we know if we achieve it?

“With business analytics, we can, on a yearly basis, monitor how close or far we stand from reaching our goal,” said Hor.

Working closely with Hor and his team at NUS is SAP’s Senior Vice President of Business User and Platform Organisation Simon Dale.

Together, SAP and NUS will design a new Business Analytics application that is suitable for research-intensive higher education institutions.

“Once we have gathered substantial requirements from NUS, we will start the productisation process. We will identify requirements that are generic to most research universities so it can be deployed in as little as eight weeks with minimal customisation,” said Dale.

SAP has recently launched 10 new applications designed for specific industries, including the public sector, healthcare, and defense and security.

These applications are designed to work with structured or unstructured data from any SAP or non-SAP system.

Schools and departments are capturing similar or the same data at various points and have different ways of defining terms.

“When reporting the number of students we have today, for example, one department has 32,000 and another 31,500,” he said.

Such inconsistency in data is unacceptable to management, according to Hor. It affects decision making, forecasting and planning, reporting to the Ministry of Education, funding, and ultimately the university’s global ranking.

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