Administrative staff manage essential financial, operational and technical workflows and resources of the university. They understand the granular levels of operational management on campus and they deal with data, lots of data, each day. Many, if not most of these individuals, enjoy substantial mastery of the campus transactional systems. Periodically, faculty, researchers, fellow administrative staff and executive officers request SQL queries be conducted by administrative staff. This is an endless process.

Hydra will substantially reduce the number of such requests related to teaching-learning-research activities. Hydra is designed to conduct relevant queries automatically using its Advanced Search and Interactive Student Table. Why is this important

• The institutional research officer can now collaborate with the chief academic officer to conduct additional research with current (real-time) data.
• Research can be conducted using data from the Learning Management System, the Customer Relationship System, the Student Information System and more. What does more mean Additional internal and external data can be integrated into the Hydra platform. Hydra uses a data pipeline of internal and external data from which the data can be extracted, transformed and displayed in interactive visualizations.
• Hydra's interactive visualizations enable users to conduct both individual and cohort-based analyses.
• Because the academic sector, including institutional research, student success, academic support and other academic auxiliary departments will have access to more data sources, their annual reports will expand as they develop metrics and analyses of activities related to teaching-learning-research experiences.
• No longer will you need to ask someone else to conduct a query for you and you won't have to spend hours trying to figure how to display the data so someone else can understand your analysis.