Heidi Plus to boost business intelligence capability of UK HE providers

The Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) has launched Heidi Plus, a new business intelligence service for the UK higher education sector. Heidi Plus is the result of a joint project between HESA and Jisc to boost the business intelligence capability of UK HE providers. The service provides access to extensive data and the latest visualisation technology to promote efficient decision making in HE.

Bringing together the data specialists of HESA with the support and technology expertise of Jisc the Heidi Plus service aims to bring the benefits of better business intelligence to UK higher education. Using the most up-to-date data exploration and analytics software, Heidi Plus gives users access to extensive and detailed HESA data sets. The accessible interactive system gives users the power to creatively analyse and generate insights from the data.

Heidi Plus is aimed at saving time and money by making it quick and easy for decision makers to directly access the information they need. This can free up time for data specialists to interrogate data in depth and produce striking graphics, maps and visualisations. The system’s flexibility enables analysis of HESA’s official data on students, graduates, staff, finances, business interactions and estates.

The Heidi Plus system is freely available to HESA-subscribing HE providers enabling them to gain competitive insights and inform strategic decision-making. Non-profit HE sector bodies can also subscribe to Heidi Plus as an invaluable tool for research, reporting and policy-making. The data in Heidi Plus covers the whole UK HE sector.

Paul Clark, chief executive of HESA, said: 'HESA is keen to help institutions meet the demands of efficiency and data is a critical component of this agenda. Heidi Plus will keep down the costs of analysing data and can be used to make better decisions about how to allocate scarce resources and benchmark organisations in terms of their operational efficiency.

'Through Heidi Plus providers and stakeholders can access information stored in a data warehouse using state-of-the-art analytical tools. This is a giant leap from the current HEIDI service and will significantly raise analytical capability within universities.'

Phil Richards, Jisc’s chief innovation officer, added: 'Jisc is dedicated to empowering educators, researchers and professional services colleagues through the effective use of digital technology. The launch of Heidi Plus represents an enormous achievement in pursuit of this aim.

'Deployment of the Heidi Plus service marks a step-change in UK higher education’s business intelligence capabilities. It opens the door to significant cost savings, better decision-making and faster access to shared data while ensuring the sector stays globally competitive.'