Page 11 - 2021 OIT Progress Report

page and Admissions sites. The new look of these pages considers evolving marketing priorities as well as the changing methods people use to view our web pages. Today, a significant number of visitors to SMU. edu – especially prospective students – view the web site using mobile devices. The new brand offers a much richer experience on a mobile device.
In order to apply this new brand throughout the existing SMU web site, templates were created within Sitecore, our content management system, that
meet the requirements of the various schools and departments. Work is underway to develop templates for the Meadows School of the Arts site. OIT’s web team will continue working with each area across campus to provide these same brand objectives to the entirety of SMU’s web presence.
DATA MARTS, DASHBOARDS, AND DATA VISUALIZATIONS
Within SMU, the amount of data produced each day
is increasing at an exponential rate. OIT embraced
the challenge to assist University decision makers in gathering and presenting data by building dashboards, visualizations, and data marts for long term initiatives such as SMU-in-Four as well as rapid initiatives such as COVID statistics to help find meaningful ways to apply data to business decisions.
Building real-time reports is important for operational tasks. For example, a new dashboard report was built in my.SMU to help the University Advising Center track completion of tasks by the incoming first year and transfer class. The my.SMU team also deployed a grant dashboard for researchers to see the balance of their grants.
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