Welcome to Cost Wise College

Welcome to our new blog site, this site is linked to our website http://www.costwisecollege.com/ (coming very soon) and has been developed to provide us with the ability to quickly share our stories, experiences and successes implementing cost, performance and predictive models in the higher education sector.

Why did we focus on higher education? Well there were a number of compelling reasons, but primarily there was a sudden demand for our services in Australia and here in the U.S. a report was released by the Department of Education "A Test of Leadership - Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education" which outlined a range of issues facing higher education here in the U.S. with a primary factor being that the cost of education has been rapidly rising and this needs to be controlled so that more people can attend universities.

I personally have had a great deal of experience with implementing large scale, complex cost and performance models inside Government organizations for about twelve years now, boy has time flown by. The benefit of this experience is that we have had to create solutions to meet the unique requirements of our Government clients and make sure it was done cost effectively.

It amuses me (and equally concerns me when I'm signing up for a contract - maybe more concern than amusement) that some clients want to have everything all at once. They want to migrate from their manual data collection system with 1970's mainframe technology to a fully blown automated, near real time, Business Intelligence environment that will not only help with better business decisions but also brew their coffee and forecast the next 10 years of winning lotto numbers. This is more disturbing when some of the fundamentals haven't been resolved yet, like where is our money going? What are our outputs? Are we making or losing money? Yes this is true for Government organizations as well, particularly for Internal Transfer Pricing, or in the case of our Military clients - Foreign Military Sales.

This is equally true for Not For Profit Universities, there has to be a fundamental understanding of what's coming in and what's going out and how do you effectively budget and forecast for next year. These solutions do not have to be big bang solutions either, there have been far too many reports of large scale, very expensive IT projects that have run well over time and budget. It is our objective to ease the client into solutions, starting with some pretty fundamental issues like consolidating all the data into one area, we certainly don't need a near-real time Extract Transform and Load (ETL) solution to accomplish this, particularly if the current way of doing this is to manually collect from a range of various sources over a period of a month and then take another week to massage it in Excel. It has also been our experience that IT folk get very nervous when you dare suggest plugging into their servers, so most of the time the data is sent to us in a text file, excel format, XML format etc. basically any way works for us, as long as it is consistent.

Anyway, we can get into the detailed intricacies of data collection, cleansing, model building, cube building, report drafting, dash board creating, predictive modeling at a later date. I just wanted to take this time to welcome you and to set up the foundation for what is intended to be a collaborative type environment, so please feel free to comment on this post and to ask any specific questions you may have or are facing in relation to the wonderful world of cost and performance modeling.

Cheers,

Lea Patterson