Universities are increasingly expected to make faster, evidence-led decisions while meeting rising expectations around student experience, regulatory reporting, and data protection. Yet in many institutions, data remains fragmented across systems, definitions vary between teams, and reporting becomes a manual exercise in reconciliation rather than a trusted capability.
Senior leaders often see the symptoms clearly: dashboards that do not reflect operational reality, slow turnaround for insight, duplicated datasets, unclear ownership of “what is true”, and data quality issues surfacing at critical moments – returns, audits, recruitment cycles, progression monitoring, and planning. The result is risk, wasted effort, and reduced confidence in decision-making.
PACT Solutions’ Data capability establishes trusted foundations and turns them into practical, usable services. We combine governance, architecture, quality, reporting and AI readiness into a coherent, pragmatic approach. We focus on building confidence quickly, while creating sustainable platforms and ways of working that universities can operate and evolve.
Our services
- Data strategy and Target Operating Model (TOM) for ownership, stewardship and governance
- Data governance and information management, including definitions, controls, policies and standards
- Data architecture and platform direction, including modern lakehouse and analytics patterns
- Data quality improvement and Master Data Management (MDM) foundations
- Reporting and MI, including requirements, semantic models, Power BI enablement and insight products
- AI readiness, including data foundations, prioritised use cases, controls and safe adoption
Our track record
Buckinghamshire New
NEXUS Preparation Project
— Data foundations to support BNU’s future student record and student journey ambitions.
– Clarified ownership and accountability for core data domains across the student journey.
– Set direction for trusted data foundations to support MI, service improvement, and future AI capability.
– Shaped the target approach for data and integration to improve reuse and reduce risk from point-to-point dependencies.
Birmingham City University
SITS Improvement Programme
– Improving confidence in student data and insight to support service performance and decision-making.
– Identified priority data pain points impacting operations, reporting, and regulatory confidence.
– Defined a practical improvement roadmap across data quality, MI, and enabling foundations.
– Strengthened governance and decision-making so reporting and improvement activity stays aligned to institutional priorities.
