Cognos, specialized in business intelligence and performance management solutions, and Exeter Group, a provider of IT consulting services to the higher education marketplace, announced their role in the launch of NACUBO’s online, interactive solution designed to help colleges and universities compare management strategies with a peer group and industry norms. The first application for this tool will be in the area of tuition discounting strategies.

Each year, the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) conducts a detailed tuition discounting survey among its members. To date, results were only shared as a flat file on a CD, preventing business officers’ from drilling into the data and conducting their own queries and analysis.

With the NACUBO Benchmarking Tool - developed by Exeter Group and powered by Cognos software - participating NACUBO members can now access the information online, viewing and comparing critical tuition discounting information against self-selected peer groups. Leveraging Cognos 8 Business Intelligence (BI) - which offers reporting, analysis, scorecarding and business event management all on a single architecture - users can perform detailed multi-dimensional analysis to confidently identify the tuition discounting strategies that best suit their organization’s needs. All survey information is aggregated and presented anonymously in order to maintain sensitive data confidentiality.

Available on or about August 1 to 425 participating universities, the NACUBO Benchmarking Tool will be expanded to include over 700 universities by the fall. The tuition discounting application is the first in a series of benchmarking solutions that NACUBO plans to make available to its members in topical areas such as endowment management and key financial indicators.

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