One of BI's most useful features is its ability to standardize data from across an institution. This may seem basic, but administrators say that before utilizing BI, they never had a full picture of where their institutions were. "Different departments were coming up with different numbers for the same thing,"  we are putting the technology directly in the hands of the people responsible and able to improve the process. The collaboration capability enables communications with other educators on a real-time basis on what is working and what is not working, on a micro level or macro level.

For instance, Penn State recently conducted an RFP and selected Oracle's OBIEE Plus as the underlying technology for their Information Hub.

The main goal of their Business Intelligence Program is the development of their BI Platform called Institutional Insight System.

The main objectives for which OBIEE Plus was selected are as follows:

• The Institutional Insight System represents Penn State's Strategic Business Intelligence framework. This system will consist of an integrated arrangement of data repositories, software, and hardware components. It will have the ability to integrate data from a broad spectrum of university information systems and data repositories and will have the capability to make information available through a multitude of channels.
  
• The Penn State Institutional Insight System will be metadata driven. Information sources will be presented through a logical model that reflects business process and is intuitive to end-users. Key attribute definitions, as well as calculations, will be common and consistent for all users. A metadata-driven approach will allow Penn State to step away from a report-driven approach to data analysis and discovery and to give information users the power to independently obtain the information that they need when they need it.
  
• The Institutional Insight System technical infrastructure will be hosted and supported centrally but will be available to all Penn State constituencies to make their data and information available to university information users.