Evisions Blog
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Understanding When and Why Training is Needed
As a reporting manager, you become rightly concerned when: Your team can’t get reports out the door on time The reports that do go out look unprofessional The quality of the reports is inconsistent Your team struggles with the reporting tool You...
Restructuring the Report Tree
The starting point for all your reports is the report tree. It contains the tools you use to make budget decisions, analyze departmental trends, run course and student database applications, and more. It is an unassuming, yet important, place for...
How To Take The Guesswork Out of Advancement
Many prestigious schools face a common dilemma. Young people, specifically college graduates, are more philanthropic than ever, generously donating to charitable causes. However, these same students and graduates may also be under the impression...
How to Gather Data from Other Reporting Tools
The decision has been made that your institution will be switching to a new reporting tool. The existing tool has been in place for years. There are a multitude of reports that work like a well-oiled machine and haven’t been touched since their...
Is it Time to Change Enterprise Reporting Solutions?
As unpleasant as change can be in an organization, a lack of change is potentially more unpleasant. Some might even consider change a four letter word. After all, it is one of the most challenging issues that we face in life, much less in the...
The Weighting Game: In-House vs. Outsourcing
Requests for new reports and dashboards are constant. You’ve been able to manage for a while, but now you are starting to realize that the amount of work piling up is more than your team can handle in its current state. This leaves you with two...
Training Your Reporting Staff
Employee training is essential for an institution’s success. Despite the importance of training, there can be resistance, with claims that training costs too much and takes employees away from real work. Proper allocation of training budgets and...
Juggling Priorities And Ranking Report Requests
Our world today is swamped with data. More data than ever before is available to help us make decisions. Whether this abundance of information is actually helpful to decision-making or instead leads to analysis-paralysis depends largely on our...
Seven Steps to More Flexible Dashboards and Sustainable Reports
Picture the following scenario: The boss calls at 3:30 P.M. wanting a report on specific data and charts for a presentation first thing the next morning. Quickly, you run an SQL statement to dump the data into a spreadsheet, filter it down to...
How to Gather Requirements and Solve Problems
You’ve heard the expression “first things first”? It sounds obvious, but as you’ll see, we can’t take anything for granted or assume things will get done as expected unless we take pains to spell out the necessary steps. To start with first things...
Argos Dashboard Makes Information Accessible in Lansing Community College’s Financial Aid Office
At Financial Aid offices across the country, managing even the most essential reports and information can feel insurmountable. This was the case at Lansing Community College (LCC) in Lansing, Michigan, where Financial Aid...
What Everyone Should Know About Data Dumps
These days, it seems like everybody has an easy-to-access place to hold all the digital information that’s important to them. No, not smart phones! We’re talking about the personal data dump. It Starts With A Question It all begins innocently...
Best Practices for DataBlock Design, part three: The Value of Good Documentation
If you’re just joining us, welcome to the third and final installment of our series on good Argos DataBlock design. Our first two chapters covered Planning Your Ideal DataBlock and Getting The Look Just Right. Today, I want to talk about an...
Best Practices for DataBlock Design, Part Two: Getting the Look Just Right
Welcome to our second installment of our Best Practices for Argos DataBlock Design series. If you were following along with our last post, you should now have everything you need to get started with the visual design of your...
Leave Costly, Cumbersome Paper Bills Behind—Switch to E-Billing with FormFusion
Here’s a scenario that might sound familiar: There’s a medium-sized university that, in order to mail tuition bills to its students, must first jump through a dizzying array of hoops. Staff members spend weeks gathering...