Beyond the Dashboard: Higher Education Analytics User Group

This event is brought to you by the University of Cambridge and the HE data community, in collaboration with the Information Lab and HESPA.

This full day, tool-agnostic analytics event is open to the broader HE analytics community, building on the previous Tableau and Alteryx user group and now expanding to cover other tools including Power BI, Snowflake, and dbt.

The day will bring together data analysts from across higher education to share real work, compare notes, and explore where the field is heading, through breakout sessions, a panel discussion, and an opening keynote. The programme is below.

After the event: For anyone wanting to continue the conversation after the event, we plan to head to The Starman at Turing Locke, 37 Eddington Avenue, Cambridge, CB3 1AS, for drinks.

We have limited the number of places for each institution to two in the first instance.

This event is now full, however we do understand that its likely that some people will need to cancel their place and so we're operating a waiting list - please email Lisa to request a place on that list

Logistics

• Venue: The event will take place at The University of Cambridge - West Hub, JJ Thomson Ave, Cambridge, CB3 0US.
• Travel information: https://www.westcambridgehub.uk/visit/
• Accommodation: for those travelling the night before, nearby options include the Premier Inn, Huntingdon Rd, Girton, Cambridge CB3 0DL, and the Hyatt Centric Cambridge, 37 Eddington Av, CB3 1SE.

Contacts

• Neil Davidson, University of Nottingham.
• Natalie Butler, Leeds Beckett University.
• Constanza Arias-Aldana, University of Cambridge
• Sasha Hanna and Thierry Driver, The Information Lab.
• Lisa Ambler, HESPA.

Programme

09:00: Registration and networking

09:30: Welcome and scene setting

09:35: Opening keynote – Title TBC

Ben Warn - Head of the Planning and Strategy Office, University of Cambridge

Details to follow

10:00: Opening keynote - From Academic Scorecard to Action: Bringing Strategy to Life with PowerKPIs

Prof. Dr. Klaus Schulte, Professor of Management Accounting at Münster School of Business in Germany.

How do you turn strategic ambition into something measurable, and measurement into something people actually act on? Drawing on FH Münster's experience with the Academic Scorecard, this keynote explores how strategic goals can be translated into clear, trackable objectives, and brought to life through modern, interactive analytics, including a look at Tableau's PowerKPIs extension. A fitting opening to a day exploring how data teams across HE turn strategy into action.

10:30: Break

10:45: Breakout sessions (details below)

11:30: Breakout sessions (details below)

12:15: Lunch and informal networking 

13:15: Plenary - hear from Snowflake, Alteryx and Tableau about their product roadmaps

14:15: Breakout sessions (details below)

15:00: Breakout sessions (details below)

15:45: Break

15:55: Closing session

16:25: Closing remarks

16:30: Networking and departures

Breakout sessions are listed below - timings TBC

Take it with a grain of SALT: Automating Strategic and Operational Reporting with Snowflake, Alteryx & Tableau

• Natalie Butler, Senior Strategic Insight Manager - Leeds Beckett University
• Tableau and Alteryx have been part of our reporting toolkit for several years. We have since added Snowflake and we are in the process of retiring SAP Business Objects, rethinking how we do both strategic and operational reporting from the ground up. In this session we will be sharing what we have been doing, and what we’ve learned in the process.

How the University of Birmingham cut critical reporting time by 91% during peak admissions

• Julian Kobylarz, Business Intelligence Development Manager - University of Birmingham
• Full session details to be confirmed. This session will cover how the University of Birmingham has been using dbt to support their reporting and analytics work.

From Power BI to Fabric: Architecture, Data Engineering and AI in practice

• Richard Salter, Director of Analytics - King’s College London
• King's College London shares its evolution from a Power BI-centric environment to a Microsoft Fabric-based data platform. This session examines the architectural principles behind that shift, including data domain design and medallion architecture, and how Fabric components — lakehouses, pipelines, notebooks, variable libraries and mirrored databases — have built a more robust, scalable data engineering capability. It also explores how this has enabled a shift towards a data product approach, and the emerging machine learning capabilities this has unlocked.

Semantics Matter. Building a semantic layer that works for you

• Speaker to be confirmed soon - University of Bristol
• Full session details to be confirmed. 

Alteryx and Tableau as cornerstones of solution architecture for HE planning needs

• Katya Samoylova, Head of the Business Information and Strategic Insights team, University of Cambridge
• The Business Information and Strategic Insights (BISI) team at the University of Cambridge has used Tableau and Alteryx for nearly a decade, evolving from specific tasks like student number planning and statutory returns into strategic deployment across a wide range of data and BI outputs. This session will showcase the versatility of these tools and how skills and solutions transfer across different areas of planning work.
  

Is it a Bird? Is it a plane? No, it's Data Governance!

• Leanne Sowter, Head of Data Governance - University of Nottingham
• Data governance can sometimes be confusing, it can mean different things depending on which company you work for, and sometimes it isn't clear what benefits it can actually bring.
• Come along to this session to find out what data governance is at the University of Nottingham and how it has been able to help analysts and other staff along the way!

How BPP is using CoWork for conversational analytics

• BPP University:
• Full session details to be confirmed. This session will cover how BPP University has been using Snowflake to support their reporting and analytics work

Time travelling to next year’s league tables: Using Tableau to predict graduate outcomes performance

• Mohammed Yakub, Data Analyst, Bucks New University.
• This workshop introduces a practical approach to predicting university league table performance in graduate outcomes up to a year before publication. Using unrounded sector data from HESA’s Heidi Plus regarding the 23/24 graduate cohort, the session will demonstrate how to use Tableau to replicate the Complete University Guide’s methodology, accurately forecasting both institutional and subject rankings for graduate outcomes metrics in CUG 2028. It will also explore the strategic value of this predictive approach for institutional planning and decision-making.

Speakers

Ben Warn, Head of the Planning and Strategy Office, University of Cambridge

Julian Kobylarz, Business Intelligence Development Manager, University of Birmingham

Katya Samoylova, Head of the Business Information and Strategic Insights team, University of Cambridge

Klaus Schulte is a professor of management accounting at Münster School of Business in Germany, where he teaches data visualization and Tableau across various programs. Alongside his academic work, he is part of Apps for Tableau, helping organizations get more value from Tableau through innovative extensions and analytics solutions. In 2018, Klaus became the Iron Viz Champion at Tableau Conference Europe in London. He is well known in the Tableau community for his work on data visualization and, in particular, for rethinking how financial and management information can be explored visually.

Leanne Sowter, Head of Data Governance, University of Nottingham

Mohammed Yakub, Data Analyst, Bucks New University

Natalie Butler, Senior Strategic Insight Manager, Leeds Beckett University

Richard Salter, Director of Analytics, King’s College London