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 Users Group has transformed to a smaller group now referred to as e-Data Coordinators. This group represents a cross section from colleges and departments and provides feedback and recommendation for enhancements for e-Data.
- A number of predefined Cognos reports have been released to give e-Data users easier access.
- The data marts are being updated as information is available, but much of the data transformation still requires manual manipulation.
- A test environment has been created to allow future development without risking compromise of the production e-Data.
Next Steps
- The Data Warehouse Leadership Group decided the next applications would focus on developing data marts in support of RMM regarding tuition generation and utilities monitoring.
- Completing the automated systems for extract, transform, and load to periodically refresh the data for the data marts related to RMM.
- Expand the budget data mart to include more detail.
- Develop an e-Data policy addressing data security and privacy.
