How Microstrategy helped the University of Miami implement business intelligence

The University of Miami employs 10 000 faculty and staff who work with the students and in the university’s back offices. Their hiring, professional progression and achievement affect both the university as well as the students. To ensure that the right people are hired and retained, the HR department wanted to be able to determine career progression, appropriate compensation and benefits, compliance with US laws and equality programmes, and the quality of the university as an employer. 

To meet its HR needs, the university created the HR application on the MicroStrategy platform. The purpose of HR at the university is twofold:

• To aid in the recruiting and retention of the best talent, and 
• To serve as a feedback mechanism to both the university and the US government.

The HR department is the primary user of the application and it supports at least one user within each other department of the university. Users prefer the grid view for most requests but as users and data analysis evolve, graph views also became necessary.

HR employees can analyse compensation and benefits packages to create the most attractive options. These can be used to recruit and retain the most talented professionals in each field, giving the university excellent faculty and staff, as well as a good reputation in professional circles.

Users can analyse employees' career progressions by department to asses the need for additional recruiting and promotion, or to develop plans for the advancement of current employees. For example, a department might have few professors at the tenured level, and not enough in the entry-level positions. The HR user could remedy this by starting a search for entry-level professors, while analysing the qualifications for promoting current professors.

The HR department is also responsible for analysing organisational structures around the university. Organisational structure may be built around the function and culture of each department, affecting the success of each one. By analysing structures against functions, users can see the most successful combinations for every department.

In the US - as well as in other parts of the world - one of the biggest responsibilities of the HR department is reporting on affirmative action and equality. Users can analyse the hiring, career progression, and compensation of individuals from different groups to identify areas of strengths or weakness.

The university sends the results to the US government to comply with governmentmandates, but it also uses them for planning purposes. How to attract and retain qualified individuals from different backgrounds is one of the main areas of focus. Users can see trends and use predictive analytics to see what attracts these individuals, in order to create a diverse workforce.

Since the implementation of MicroStrategy at the university, the HR department has been able to run queries faster and analyse data in many more ways than they could before. The new methods of analysis like trends and predictive analytics allow them to analyse not only the university employees but the HR department too. With this information, they have been able to improve their hiring and retention policies, as well as their reporting to the USgovernment.