Nottingham Trent University has joined forces with IBM to help streamline information on finance, human resources, estate and student records.

The new system from the technology giant will consolidate data from each department into reports and dashboards, allowing the university to make more effective decisions about investment and resources.

The institution took on the new technology in a bid to improve its reporting and analysis capabilities and provide more reliable information.

James Lacey, Director of Finance at Nottingham Trent University commented: “Higher education is a highly competitive environment and universities are large complex organisations facing challenging times in terms of public sector spending cuts.”

“The volume of data we have to process is mind boggling, including applications, enrolments, completion rates and a whole number of other metrics for some 25,000 students. Turning this mass of data into meaningful management information is not a simple task.”

“We will gain a competitive edge by turning the data collected into useful information that we can analyse,” he added.