Beyond Dashboards: Using a Data Platform to Power Reporting, Integrations, and AI

Many institutions have invested in data warehouses, lakes, and reporting tools—yet still struggle with fragmented pipelines, inconsistent definitions, and brittle integrations. Too often, data warehouses are seen primarily as tools for dashboards and analytics. What if they could do much more across your institution? This session explores how a community college, in collaboration with peer institutions, reimagined its data warehouse as a unified data platform—supporting not just analytics, but also mandated reporting, system integrations, and emerging AI use cases. By organizing how data is ingested, transformed, validated, and distributed within a shared, platform-agnostic architecture, institutions can reduce duplication, improve governance, and enable new capabilities without vendor lock-in. Unlike traditional approaches that separate reporting and integrations, this model unifies both within a single data platform. We will demonstrate how this approach replaces siloed reporting processes and disparate integrations with a single governed data pipeline that powers multiple use cases—from dashboards to operational data flows, such as syncing data between student systems and learning management systems. Attendees will leave with practical strategies for designing a scalable, cost-effective data platform that aligns people, process, and technology—no matter where they are in their data journey.