Case Study: Flinders University achieves 7x faster reporting and near-real-time student insights with Databricks

Building a responsive campus community with data and AI

Flinders University, serving over 25,000 students, needed better ways to understand student wellbeing, curriculum impact and overall student experience but was hampered by large volumes of siloed data, legacy on‑premises infrastructure and slow, unreliable reporting—often taking up to a week—which undermined timely, data‑driven decision making.

Using the Databricks Lakehouse on Microsoft Azure (Delta Lake, Power BI, Azure Data Factory and MLflow) Flinders built the Flinders Intelligence Portal (FLIP), a centralized self‑service platform that delivers near real‑time, trusted student insights. The new stack enabled daily automated reporting (7x faster), predictive models for student success, reduced costs and increased capacity and confidence across teams, helping leaders respond quickly to trends such as COVID‑era enrollment changes.

Flinders University

Luke Havelberg

Interim CIO