Data Warehouse
Iowa State University is creating an environment for decision making, supported by timely and accurate information from an official authenticated source. The foundation is an enterprise-wide data warehouse (DWH) along with business intelligence (BI) tools for reporting and analysis to improve decision-making for strategic and operational activities.
The initial phase has two objectives:
- Establish the technical infrastructure and develop the skills necessary to establish, maintain, and support an enterprise data warehouse.
- Create the data repositories, along with the reports and other data presentations necessary to meet the information needs, to support the decision-making processes in the Resource Management Model (RMM).
Benefits
- The DWH provides a single authenticated source for official university information.
- A robust set of BI tools gives access to university information to a broad section of the campus community.
- The DWH will provide a clear and common understanding of university data through enforcement of standards.
- Official, uniform, consistent, and clean data will enhance the transparency of reporting and business processes such as the RMM.
- The DWH has the potential to make efficient use of resources by specializing skills and reducing time spent in producing management reports.
Leadership
- Governance will be lead by the DWH Leadership Group that will concentrate on policy and overall direction.
- The DWH Users Group is a cross-section of end users that give input on future direction and feedback on implementation.
- IT Services will provide the operations leadership and guidance in use of the BI tools.
Investments
- Seed funding for a prototype was provided by Business & Finance and IT Services.
- The President's Office provided two years of funding for one FTE to dedicate to the DWH initiative for RMM.
- IT Services reallocated one FTE to lead the DWH initiative.
- The initial implementation funding of $500k was provided by the Executive Vice President & Provost.
- Ongoing funding will come from the IT Services expense pool under the RMM.
Contact
- Lynn Miller, Manager, Business and Finance Systems, IT Services
Recent Accomplishments
- The Data Warehouse Leadership Group decided the next application would focus on developing a data mart to support the RMM decision-making regarding tuition generation.
- The Data Warehouse Users Group continues to meet and concentrated on training for using the RMM data marts and provided feedback for improvement.
- The existing RMM OLAP cubes were rebuilt using the Cognos software.
- The Data Warehouse Users Group has been trained on use of the Institutional Research Faculty/Staff data marts.
Next Steps
- Continue to test, evaluate, and work with the Cognos built OLAP data cubes.
- Build the first set of reports with the Cognos product.
- Work with Cognos consulting services on the implementation plan.
- Automate the data extract, transform, and load for periodic refreshing of the data marts.
