Integrating the primary data functions of the campus into one area, the Office of Decision Support is responsible for supporting university leadership in its commitment to accountability and evidence-based decision making. By bringing together the interrelated area of Institutional Research, Institutional Effectiveness, Data Governance, and Business Intelligence, the office provides a comprehensive foundation for data collection, integration, analysis, and reporting.

The university provides access to our data warehouse environment to promote data-informed decisions and to facilitate linkage among goals and performance metrics at all levels of the university. The central presence of the institutional analysis and data governance functions in these efforts ensures closer collaboration with the academic and business units, including co-development of information resources.

Decision Support is committed to a distributed self-service business intelligence model that allows units to query, track, and analyze data at their appropriate level of focus. This also allows units with the expertise to deploy their own end user applications, tailored to their business requirements and gives them control over their development timetable. Institutions that have used this model report that the decision-makers are more likely to be data-driven when they have a greater level of creation and management responsibility for reports. This approach also increases the reporting capacity of the institution.