NBOA President and CEO
It’s no secret that the business office is the place for critical benchmarking data involving independent schools. You collect data from every department and division, enter data into various platforms, pull data as needed to benchmark progress against budgets and peer schools, and interpret data to inform important decisions and strategies. You spend, well, a lot of time on data.
Much of that changes this month, when NBOA pulls back the curtain on one of our most ambitious efforts to date. BIIS (pronounced “biz”) is a unified data collection platform that replaces and improves on many of our existing research efforts. BIIS stands for Business Intelligence for Independent Schools, and it serves the singular purpose of making it easy for you to get the business and operational data you need in the ways you need it. BIIS is unique in many ways, not the least of which is that it was built by business officers — data point by data point — for business officers.
Why now?
Because it’s time — and we can. After nearly 20 years of pursuing our unique mission to “develop, deliver and promote best business practices to advance independent schools,” NBOA now has the reputation, resources, alliances and expertise that BIIS requires. For many years, we have conducted a variety of research efforts with a variety of third-party providers.These range from best-in-class studies like the Financial Position Survey, the Business Office Compensation and Staffing Study, and targeted research efforts in the areas of technology and research, to the one-of-a-kind Commonfund Benchmarks Study of Independent School Endowments.
After nearly 20 years of pursuing our unique mission to “develop, deliver and promote best business practices to advance independent schools,” NBOA now has the reputation, resources, alliances and expertise that BIIS requires.
Yet as valuable and relevant as this work has been, BIIS is better. BIIS combines most of these disparate efforts into a single, easy-to-use platform. It integrates much of the data you have already provided through previous surveys. You access it through NBOA.org with the same sign-on credentials you use to access your other NBOA member benefits.
Most importantly, BIIS lets your school see itself in NBOA data for the first time. You decide how to customize the data based on a variety of benchmarking cohorts — for example, by day or boarding, geography, budget size, enrollment or among a cohort of 10 schools you specifically select. Plus, you can export reports at the click of a button into PowerPoint or Excel, making it that much easier to discuss key business issues with your administrative leadership team, board of trustees or faculty and staff. Complementing your customized reports, NBOA from time to time will publish aggregate reports to illuminate what we are seeing in the data and to help you analyze it in ways that are more useful to your entire school.
NBOA hasn’t built BIIS single-handedly. We have relied heavily on you, our member schools.
At the inception of this process, the NBOA Board of Directors had the wisdom and foresight to create a “data advisory group” of school and business partner leaders who have a passion for harnessing data to help independent schools succeed. For well over a year, these committed volunteers (working with NBOA staff) continuously asked two simple questions: “What data do business officers need, and how do they need it?” Critically, the group also worked under the mantra that less is more. They were rigorously selective in ensuring that BIIS only includes data that is actionable.
Finally, our partner every step of the way has been Measuring Success, which has a well-earned reputation for using quantitative tools to help mission-driven organizations, including many independent schools, enhance their strategic and tactical decision-making. In Measuring Success, I believe NBOA has a partner that can take the association’s data analysis to new levels, and can do the same for your school.
So that’s the “why” of BIIS. To learn more about the “how,” see A Better Way to Benchmark: Business Intelligence for Independent Schools. Above all, stay tuned to NBOA.org and click here to access the BIIS platform. Our important work together on this platform has only just begun.
