Illuminate Education excels at reporting educational results

Fast delivery, word-of-mouth excitement, huge business growth

Challenge

"Our software engineers were building reports and coding them in PHP to create Excel outputs," says Christine Olah, Engineering Program Manager. "It was very time-consuming, we didn't have a design focus, and we were distracted from our core online testing, attendance, and scheduling modules. For new common-core testing, every state uses a different testing program with different types of data. We needed timely reports for every client type—districts, principals, teachers, parents, and students. We update online testing and attendance daily. If they logged in, they got real-time data, but if they exported data for their own reports, it would likely be stale. We didn't have a method to disseminate reports effectively, and if we didn't have quick turnaround, they would go to a different system."

Solution

"In looking at the different tools, Jaspersoft^® embedded BI was competitive in terms of price and very attractive because of its open source model. We needed some way to visualize data, and the Jaspersoft system had charting and graphing. We started in 2010, and we've seen this software get better with each new version. We're now using the Jaspersoft^® Studio tool that offers a lot more capabilities, and then the Jaspersoft^® Visualize.js^™ Javascript framework added more."

"Professional Services stayed with us through initial deployment, and that was really helpful, and one reason we were able to get up and moving in just a few months."

Benefits

Fast delivery, differentiation, word-of-mouth excitement

"We get to market fast, and that's a big differentiator. If a district sees we produce reports quickly, then other districts see the value. When we have new clients, we deploy new reports for them in just a few weeks. The deployment process was four to eight weeks using code-based reporting. With Jaspersoft, when necessary, we've pushed reports in one day. There are always things that change, and we can modify the reports and adjust the design quickly, so if a state changes the layout of their dataset, we can change our data, our reporting format."

"Because the Jaspersoft system is open source, users can create their own reports and add them. It's pretty amazing. There are over 2,500 user-created reports in our system that serve very specific needs for local accountability. Without programming users can quickly deploy their reports and make them immediately accessible. On the flip side, technical users can query the data or use our custom report building tool to pull in any data they need to develop their own reports."

Huge business growth

"With the Jaspersoft system we create fast reports and data visualizations that support our Educational Intelligence Platform. In 2011, we had about 25 reports; Now we have a catalog of over 350, and we track usage so we know the most popular reports and make sure they're optimized. Usage has grown from three states to 42, and doubled each year because we offer reports people want. We see hundreds of thousands of reports being used each month, and we have 6 million students and over 1,600 school districts that include small charter schools to really large districts. When states come out with new data, districts can use either the state system or Illuminate to view it. When the data comes out, we see that our usage, day one, is just off the charts."

Highly useful reports that tell stories

"People really respond well to the design we've invented. Not only do the reports look great, they're not just data on a page; they tell great stories. We were thoughtful about how the report design could help a parent see what the data means for their student, or help a teacher quickly identify which students need intervention, which ones are chronically absent, which group is excelling and might need additional resources. It's due to having lots of options within the Jaspersoft Studio tool."

Future

"One of the new features is geospatial mapping. We want to definitely explore and see how we could use it for helping users develop insights or find geographical patterns. Maybe there are behavior patterns at a school or within a community. So I think there's promise for being of value to them. We're also working on providing predictive analytics, and using the system to customize visualizations will be key to helping the everyday user interpret that data. Continuing to get better using Jaspersoft embedded BI is going to differentiate us in our market."