Meet CBU’s Data Champions – The Business Intelligence Unit

Data are units of factual information used as a basis for reasoning. Using data in a university setting can significantly help our employees maintain what makes CBU special by keeping us aware of the changing needs of students, while protecting us from threats that may hinder our University. This is why Colin MacInnis, Manager of CBU’s new Business Intelligence (BI) Unit, believes data is paramount in the workplace and pushed to have a BI unit become a reality at CBU.

Colin joined the CBU family in 2019 as a Marketing & Recruitment Specialist. This is when Colin saw data that suggested that CBU advertisements had high view counts, but low engagement. “From the people who viewed our web pages, very little were actually converting,” Colin explains. After looking further into it, he became curious to find out if other departments were aware of the gaps. He discussed it with Domestic and International Recruitment, Alumni, the Compass team, Academic Planning and others. These departments were aware the gaps were present, but didn’t have the capacity to address them. That’s when the conversation of a BI unit was born.

The BI unit is a team of three: Colin MacInnis, Manager of Business Intelligence; Brett Shaw, Marketing Automation Specialist; and Chris Tournidis, Digital Recruiter. The BI unit will work with Marketing, Communications and Recruitment to build data supports, implement tracking and report on our efforts for campaigns, events and ads. It will also analyze trends and demand forecasting of the inner working parts of CBU as it pertains to the student lifecycle.

Colin is excited by the potential future of the BI unit and what it can achieve, as CBU will now have a more quantitative view of what the student lifecycle is, how it behaves, how it has changed and how we should adjust. “Now we’ll know if we should change parts of our processes, develop new programs, adjust how we promote CBU, or if we need to do more of what’s already working,” says Colin.

Colin is also excited about the data serving as a prompt for fellow managers to creatively use their imaginations to challenge the norms of the way they operate daily at CBU.

We look forward to seeing the ways in which the BI unit improves the student experience here at CBU.