Our CATCH Partnership with NDUS, North Dakota University System, showcases the power of collaboration. Together, we’ve achieved key milestones, addressing challenges and making meaningful progress. This success story highlights our shared efforts and impressive results, reflecting the strength of our partnership and commitment to positive change. We’re proud to share this story as a testament to the impact of working together toward a common goal.
North Dakota University System
A Success Story Partnering with CATCH Intelligence
Background:
The North Dakota University System (NDUS) includes eleven (11) institutions, all governed by the State Board of Higher Education (SBHE), and has five community colleges, four regional universities, and two research universities with approximately 80,000 students, faculty, and staff. For NDUS to compete in the fierce higher education market, each institution must work together; however, its data teams lacked the infrastructure, processes, and best practices to achieve its strategic goals.
CATCH Intelligence specializes in helping organizations like NDUS to leverage their data to achieve their goals, including establishing the six pillars of success (People, Processes, Practices, Data Architecture, Data Governance and Technology).
Ryan Jockers, Assistant Director of Reporting and Analytics for NDUS, selected CATCH Intelligence to be their strategic partner in framing up the overall approach and in providing thought leadership to help NDUS to take a fresh look at how they approach enterprise data management and analytics and accelerate its path forward. This approach now serves as the foundation for data-driven education management and meeting the goals of NDUS to provide unparalleled access to insights across their entire state university system.
Here is the success story of how CATCH Intelligence assisted NDUS in their journey.
How CATCH Intelligence helped NDUS move up the maturity curve with Data Management, Reporting, and Analytics:
Our first engagement with NDUS began with a Data-Driven Analytics Strategic Planning Assessment. According to Ryan, this engagement provided great value by looking across their data landscape, as it helped them to identify the current state situation at NDUS, in relation to achieving their strategic goals and objectives. The assessment starts with listening to our customer (Ryan and team), developing an understanding of their current maturity level in key areas (the six pillars), communicating the blueprint for success, and, in collaboration with them, determining the key, strategic capabilities they need to establish or enhance to achieve their near-term and longer-term goals.
Through this assessment, CATCH identified key areas that would be the greatest benefit to NDUS. These included establishing a strong foundation and key disciplines to serve as the catalysts for maximizing their data and investments in technology, leading to follow-on engagements with CATCH in targeted areas: establishing a Business Intelligence Competency Center (BICC) and Data Governance disciplines; providing repeatable processes and templates that allow NDUS to have the confidence to build out these disciplines, knowing that they were leveraging CATCH’s industry-proven methods, processes, and experience.
In addition to providing the foundation for establishing strong data management and data governance processes and practices, CATCH also provided guidance in establishing an industry-leading target data architecture vision to bring data together under a unified data hub to serve as an enterprise data resource, mentoring in the setup and configuration of their chosen technology platform (the Azure Cloud-based platform), and coaching and mentoring in a data pilot effort.
Through these engagements, CATCH was able to help Ryan and team establish critical foundational capabilities that have enabled their organization to scale and meet the growing demand for data and reporting/analytical solutions by the information consumers they serve.
According to Ryan, these capabilities, the repeatable processes and templates, and the coaching provided by CATCH have been valuable in allowing NDUS to move up the maturity curve at their own pace, while leveraging the industry-leading expertise from CATCH Intelligence. CATCH takes the “teach them to fish” approach with our customers, and the NDUS journey and success story is one of the best testimonials from our customers. We have remained a strategic partner throughout this journey, providing the right resources with deep industry knowledge for the foundational components that NDUS wanted and needed to develop.
A good strategic partnership requires listening to your customer, and in the case of NDUS, Ryan had a vision for what NDUS needed and leveraged CATCH to help him realize that vision. He understood that he had limited resources and needed to choose wisely and cost-effectively when choosing where to apply those resources. Ryan noted that they could not take an “if you build it, they might come” approach to building an all-encompassing data warehouse. Instead, they needed to take a cost-based approach of incrementally building their data foundation, focusing on delivering value with each release. He leveraged CATCH to bring the knowledge and expertise to the table, utilizing the templates and processes CATCH provided, and taking a DIY-approach when building the foundation he knew NDUS needed. This is an example of CATCH’s “teach our customers to fish” mindset. Armed with the building blocks CATCH provided, Ryan and team proceeded to establish their Information Analytics and Data Governance Executive Steering Committee and institutionalized their data governance processes, along with establishing their centralized Data Hub and Lakehouse, and creating the environment they needed to help NDUS achieve its goals. This was a great example of an organization that knew what they wanted and needed, understood they would not be able to get there alone, and recognized the value of CATCH to help them get there in a fiscally responsible way. Together with CATCH, we applied a selective sourcing approach, balancing the infusion of industry best practice and experience that CATCH provides with the need to ultimately become self-sufficient.
The build out of key foundational processes has enabled Ryan and team to be able to deliver critical data insights that had eluded them in the past. One example involved their P-Card data, where they added a couple of columns of data and leveraged an artificial intelligence (AI) model to enable better insights in reporting travel-related expenses.
NDUS today and looking forward:
Ryan is very pleased with all of the progress their organization has made over the past five plus (5+) years. He credits CATCH Intelligence for helping NDUS to move up the maturity curve and establish a solid foundation, which has positioned them very well to not only meet the needs of their customers and information consumers, but to continue to grow and evolve their data and analytics capabilities, building out the Data Hub and Lakehouse to house high-value structured and unstructured data, and leveraging Databricks and AI capabilities. CATCH has helped greatly streamlining their efforts to deliver mission-critical data across the university system, creating a competitive advantage in a challenging and ever-changing environment. NDUS plans to continue to evolve its processes and capabilities in areas to include AI governance and risk management disciplines, leveraging Microsoft Purview to support and automate data governance efforts, expanding its use of AI models, and making continuous improvements to move up the maturity curve, as they advance from achieving a “Silver” level to a “Gold” level of proficiency across the different aspects of the information life cycle.
Ryan and his team’s success story is something that CATCH Intelligence is honored to be a part of, and is one of many examples where we can celebrate with our customers, as these testimonials are a reminder of the mission of CATCH Intelligence: bringing world-class data and analytical solutions and capabilities to our customers in both the public and private sectors, delivering lasting value, and being a strategic partner along their journey.
