Lower Saxony's Ministry of Science and Culture (MWK) and Statistical Office (LSN) commissioned the German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies (DZHW) in 2002 with the installation of an information system in their own secure federal state network in order to cover their own specific information requirements. The aim was to base it on the official data supplied by Lower Saxony's higher education institutions (HEIs) to the statistical office (LSN). These data are stored on a separate server at the LSN and can be flexibly evaluated by authorised users in both institutions within Lower Saxony's ICE information system.
Lower Saxony's ICE information system makes comprehensive data bases available to MWK and LSN, in particular on the topic areas students, examinations and staff at Lower Saxony's higher education institutions (HEIs). Flexible data analysis (FleDA) is at the core of the evaluation instruments; this feature enables tables of any kind to be composed interactively using the available data pool. A special feature of Lower Saxony's ICE system is a function enabling flexible and fast evaluation of individual case data while mostly retaining the ICE's existing user interface, which was previously designed to evaluate summarised data.
As part of the project, central system support, data processing and maintenance are carried out by the ICE team. The ICE team advises and supports the MWK and LSN in all matters relating to the information system (hotline, both by telephone and e-mail).
Flexible data analysis was given a fundamentally new software architecture in 2023, bringing it up to the latest technical standard.
Other ICE-projects:
