DATA

At the dawning of analytics use inhigher education,

some schools and vendors are

indisputably aheadof the data

warehousing and business

intelligence pack.

by linda l. briggs

PIONEERS8Everyone on your campus needs information, and if your

institution is like most schools, you have plenty of it to share.But which types of data warehousing and business intelligence systemsyou choose, and how accessible, usable, and meaningful those tools makeall of that information, remain the big questions for many technologistsand administrators. Fortunately, there are always those brave pioneers,willing to move forward into uncharted territory. It’s from those who gofirst that the rest of us take our cues.

Right now, say those watching DW and BI rollouts in higher ed, ahandful of institutions have truly cutting-edge programs in place or inprocess (see “It’s a Catch-Up Game,” the first of this two-part look at data-driven decision-making, which ran in our August issue; www.campus-technology.com/article.asp?id=18953). More often, though, colleges anduniversities are in the early stages of implementing such projects (see“Analytics in Higher Ed: We’re Just Getting Started,” page 5).

Yet, the importance of making good choices for your academic ana-lytics solution can hardly be overstated. With sophisticated financialand ERP systems in place at most schools, this is one of IT’s next fron-tiers. The choices you make now will do much to enhance your com-petitive edge down the road, allowing you to accurately gauge thesuccess of recruitment efforts, pinpoint sources of research dollars,meet compliance regulations, report to outside agencies on exactlywhere dollars are going, and much more.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at three higher ed institutionswhose administrators have made very different choices in approachesto today’s data warehousing and business intelligence challenges.

The College of St. Scholastica: Breaking Down Silos via Data SharingAn operational data store, or ODS, is sometimes introduced when an insti-tution first begins to work toward implementing a full-blown data ware-house. The ODS can be used to collect data from legacy systems, as wellas short-term data from multiple sources—say, finance, financial aid, andadmissions. A data store is less complex than a data warehouse in itsstructure, and in the amount and type of data it contains. Generally, it’supdated frequently, and can be easily queried by users.

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Empowering the World ofHigher Education

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At The College of St. Scholastica, anindependent private school in northeast-ern Minnesota, CIO Lynne Hamre isusing a data store product from SunGardHigher Education (www.sungardhe.com)called Operational Data Store. Withinthe year, she plans to move to a full-fledged data warehouse product, theEnterprise Data Warehouse, also fromSunGard. The college selected the twoSunGard products in 2004 and has hadthe data store working in production forabout a year.

Moving away from data marts. Part ofwhat pushed St. Scholastica to choose aSunGard product was the fact that theschool has been running SunGard’s SCTBanner ERP system for 10 years. Toaccess the data in the ERP system, theIT department had built a number ofdepartmental data marts in-house, usingMicrosoft Access (www.microsoft.com).(A data mart is similar to a data ware-house, but generally applies to a singledepartment.) The data marts at St.Scholastica worked well for a number ofyears, Hamre says, but as they grew andproliferated, “we were having troublekeeping things consistent and reliable inthe Access databases.”

Because of the numerous silos ofinformation in the data marts, Hamresays, the IT department was strugglingto meet the data demands of users.“People wanted historical data and trendanalysis. They wanted to manipulate the

data by themselves, and they wanteddata from multiple campuses.” All ofthat was difficult or impossible withindividual data marts. St. Scholasticafirst considered developing its ownnext-generation data mart using theMicrosoft .NET platform. But the

school eventually decided that the Sun-Gard products would be more cost-effective, especially considering long-term maintenance.

Owning the ‘store.’ Users of the Sun-Gard data store come from various func-tional areas of the college (includingadmissions, the Registrar’s office, finan-cial aid, and budgeting), and are famil-iar with the ERP system and the datamart. Their sophisticated manipulationof data was helpful when the SunGardODS was implemented. Users have“really adopted the system as theirown,” Hamre says. “They have a lot ofownership in it. They like the ability toget in and get the information they need,when they need it,” rather than having

to request a report from IT. She pointsto the example of a VP and two associ-ate VPs using the system to track enroll-ment for an accelerated eight-weekprogram for non-traditional students:“They worked with one of our develop-ers to develop a report that they can run

on demand,” she explains. “With thatreport, they can track current enroll-ment in the program at any time, andfrom anywhere, without any contactwith the IT group.”

Pushing and sharing. One of the col-lege’s long-term goals is to push deci-sions out to appropriate decision-makers,Hamre says, and the SunGard ODS toolgives them the data to do that. “I’ve seenpeople who [IT] never used to work with,using this tool,” she says. “Those newusers, drawn to the product’s ease of use,now use it for a range of tasks, from rou-tine to sophisticated.”

But perhaps the biggest benefit of thesystem thus far is the ability to sharedata across departments, something thedata marts didn’t permit. “We can breakdown those silos,” Hamre says, explain-ing that now, for instance, the Admis-sions office can share a report withFinancial Aid, or Payroll can share withHuman Resources, “instead of havingdifferent reports in different areas, andhaving to worry [that] people are gettingdifferent numbers.”

USF Health: StandardizingFinancial DataIt’s no secret to technologists and admin-istrators alike: The “people challenge”of rolling out a DW/BI solution can eas-ily outweigh the technical aspects. Typ-ically, IT staff and business users mustwork together closely to plan the project

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WITH DISPARATE data marts, The College of St. Scholastica was having trouble keeping data consistent and reliable, and struggling to meet the data demands of users.

FACTBOXA pronounced benefit of any data warehousing system is the ability toshare data across departments; something that data marts, for instance,don’t permit. Data silos can thus be broken down: The Admissions office,for instance, can share a report with Financial Aid, or Payroll can sharewith Human Resources. There’s no more concern that different people are getting different numbers.

Courtesy of The C

ollege of St. S

cholastica

and determine data ownership and man-agement rights; a DW or BI projectspans many departments and calls forhigh levels of coordination, communi-cation and agreement.

Standardizing and integrating. Atthe University of South Florida Health,the healthcare school within the Univer-sity of South Florida, Jim McKenzie,assistant vice president of technologyand CIO, has wrestled with plenty ofpeople issues during an 18-month roll-out of a data warehouse and BusinessObjects’ Enterprise business intelli-gence platform (www.businessobjects.com). USF Health’s challenge: withinthat 18-month timeframe, to find andimplement a solution that could standard-ize the financial data in many departmen-tal silos, often stored in Microsoft Accessor Excel. The 8,500-user school neededto integrate with the main USF campus,which was running a Cognos (www.cog-nos.com) data warehouse. It also neededa product that could seamlessly integrate

with Access and Excel, as well as enter-prise-level financial systems like SCTBanner, Oracle PeopleSoft (www.oracle.com), and in-house systems.

McKenzie reports that to generate ameaningful report with the previoussystem required a business person to log

into each of those systems separately,cut and paste into Excel, and then builda report. “It could take a week to gener-ate a report that our current technologycan generate in 15 seconds.”

A data warehouse was the obviouschoice for a data storage structure,McKenzie adds, and securing a solid BI

tool to analyze the data was key. “Justhaving people dump all the data ontolarge, fast servers was not going toaddress the business problems,” heexplains, adding that the main university,which is huge and complex, has 41 for-mal IT organizations, “and an equal

number of shadow IT organizations.”The financial system at USF requiredUSF Health to pull financial data fromseveral main campus systems, along withclinical financial systems and its owndatabases. Once the system is fully com-pleted, data will be pulled from at least22 other major enterprise-level systems.

Validation for compliance. The newsystem also addresses compliance lawssuch as HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, andGramm-Leach-Bliley, which mandatetighter data security and controls.McKenzie points out, “Locating ourdata in a single highly secured systemlike our data warehouse, and using high-end tools like the Business Objectsapplications, we can drill down into datato see where it came from and thus beable to validate any single element inthe data warehouse. The importance ofthis reverse data lookup cannot bestressed enough.”

Data ownership. Not surprisingly forsuch a large, cross-departmental project,data ownership issues cropped upthroughout the project. With so manydepartments and organizations involved,there were considerations about whoowned the data and would control it.McKenzie says that in addressing thoseissues, which are common in data ware-housing and BI projects, he found therole of outside consultants invaluable.Because they carried no baggage nor rep-resented alignment to a particular depart-ment, he says, consultants were better

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FACTBOXFor compliance laws such as HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, and Gramm-Leach-Bliley (which mandate tighter data security and controls), locatingdata in a single highly secured system, and using high-end BI tools, allowsusers to drill down into data to see where it came from and thus be able tovalidate any single element in the data warehouse. Such reverse datalookup is crucial.

FROM DAVE WELLS, director of education, The Data Warehousing Institute (www.TDWI.org):BI best practices can offer you real guidance as you set out to launch a BI program for your

campus. Several are described in TDWI’s April 10, 2003, FlashPoint newsletter, “Ten Best Prac-tices for Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing” (www.tdwi.org/Publications/Newsletters/FlashPoint.aspx), but because they were originally devised for the non-academic workplace,let’s reconsider them in the context of academic analytics.

1. Understand the drivers. How do external forces—political, economic, social, and tech-nological—affect higher education?

2. Measure results. How should you measure when much of value is realized as intangibles?3. Make it a business initiative. Does this become “make it an academic/administrative

partnership?”4. Practice ‘user first’ design. How complex should design be when academic users are

more advanced than the typical corporate user?5. Create new value. Value is important, but how do you define and measure it? 6. Attend to human impacts. Do sophisticated users alleviate or amplify the impacts?7. Focus on information and analytics. Without standard performance metrics, where do

you start?8. Practice active data stewardship. How challenging (and how achievable) is this in an

institutional culture?9. Manage BI as a long-term investment. Again, does institutional culture aid or aggravate? 10. Reach out with BI/DW solutions. How difficult is this considering the complex organi-

zational structures common in higher education?

FROM BUSINESS INTELLIGENCETO ACADEMIC ANALYTICS

CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | November 2006

able to request data from various depart-ments, and work across organizationalboundaries. “Consultants avoided politi-cal battles,” he says. “They could makelow-level requests, and they didn’t seemthreatening.”

User resistance. People issuescropped up in other areas as well. Theuser-friendly interface of the BusinessObjects solution was a key considera-tion in its purchase, McKenzie says. Buteven after the rollout, users weren’teager to embrace a new system. “Peoplehave been terrified of the system,” henotes. The biggest issue: Users fearedthat giving up their complex depart-mental Excel spreadsheets meant a lossof control. McKenzie says that as CIO,“one of my biggest roles has been to goaround and assure people that they werenow going to run a high-level applica-tion.” Aided by Business office users,he says, “I did a lot of handholding andencouraging.”

Get help. Another important rolloutlesson: Don’t try to go it alone. “I’mvery much a CIO who doesn’t believe in hiring consultants,” McKenzie says.“But in this case, it quickly becameclear that no IT group at the universitycould roll this out alone.” The projectwas simply too massive and required too many highly specialized skills, headmits. “We needed [the outside con-sultants] and Business Objects to pull itoff. We learned that the scope of a datawarehouse project is one that most uni-versities’ IT staffs cannot take on bythemselves.” In fact, McKenzie says thescope was so large, and the systemaccess issues so political, that having anexpert third-party consulting firm han-dling much of the work made a huge dif-ference.

Towson University:Out-of-the-Box Solution to the RescueOne challenge with DW and BI solu-tions is that there are few or no existingdata models for universities to use inimplementing a data warehouse. Insome industries, such as banking orinsurance, models have been developed

that greatly simplify the structuring anddevelopment of a data warehouse.

OOTB with partners. For institutionswithout the staff and funding to buildtheir own models from scratch, iStrate-gy’s HigherEd Analytics Suite (www.istrategysolutions.com) offers a solution.

iStrategy takes a different tack by deliv-ering a largely out-of-the-box datawarehouse application specifically tai-lored to higher ed. Instead of requiringthat the user create data models, theiStrategy application comes with a pre-built data model, which in turn is

HIGHER EDUCATION IS in the early stages of a much more extensive use of tools and technologies for data analysis. That’s according to a December 2005 researchreport from the Educause Center for Applied Research (www.educause.edu/ECAR).

In the survey, researchers tabulated responses from 380 campus executives (primarily CIOs) at institutions across the US and Canada, representing both publicand private institutions and a range of sizes and budgets.

According to Phil Goldstein, an ECAR fellow and author of the report, the growinguse of analytics will be driven by factors including increased competition for students,and growing demand for more sophisticated data from both accrediting bodies andstate government.

The report uses the term “academic analytics” rather than business intelligence,but essentially addresses a broad definition of BI: As the report defines it, that definition is “the intersection of technology, information, management culture,and the application of information to manage the enterprise.”

According to Goldstein, “We’re at the beginning of the analytical story in higher education. Among the institutions that we surveyed, most plan to makeupgrades in their capacities in the next two to three years, and adopt data ware-houses and data marts and other analytical tools more ubiquitously. But we’re stillat the beginning of that.”

The growth curve toward a growing use of analytics makes sense, Goldstein says,in light of higher education’s recent progress in moving to sophisticated enterpriseresource planning (ERP) systems. With those now largely in place, institutions havestrong transaction systems and are ready to add analytical tools on top for moreadvanced functions. The report’s findings include:4The most sophisticated users in higher ed typically are those with already strong analytical backgrounds, in the offices focused on budget and planning, institutionalresearch, admissions, and in the Registrar’s office. “Those are parts of the institution thathave always had people who are analytically strong,” Goldstein explains. In many ways, headds, institutions are “just providing a new toolkit to people, so they can continue theirrole as deep analysts of information.”4Nearly half of the schools who responded to the survey are still doing most of theiranalytics by extracting data from back-end transaction systems, typically either ERP sys-tems or pre-ERP systems, using tools such as Microsoft (www.microsoft.com) Excel or ana-lytical software from SPSS (www.spss.com), Goldstein says. The other half are implement-ing or have implemented data marts or data warehouses.4Enrollment management is the area in which both the use and impact of analytics ismost strategic and beneficial—and that includes ways to improve both student retentionand enrollment results. “It stands to reason that institutions would benefit from usingthese tools in areas that already have a lot of data about what students are doing,”Goldstein explains. “If you can start mining that data, you benefit. Certainly, focusing firston major revenue streams of the institution makes a lot of sense.” 4Schools without sophisticated analytical tools could, and often were, performing dataanalysis anyway, Goldstein says, but “they were doing it the hard way.” That might mean,for instance, that they were pulling data out of one or more transaction systems, and usingExcel or other so-called “shadow systems” to manipulate it. “While specific analyticaltools make it easier to perform the kinds of analytics we’re talking about, they’re not theonly way to get there,” Goldstein concludes. More survey information, which is available forpurchase, can be found at www.educause.edu/ECAR.

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mapped to existing ERP systems. iStrat-egy integrates with Oracle PeopleSoftand Datatel (www.datatel.com), and thecompany says that plans are in the worksfor integrations with Campus Manage-ment (www.campusmanagement.com)and SunGard Higher Education. Thecompany also partners directly withDatatel and Campus Management, bothof which offer iStrategy to customers.

Unifying reporting. For Baltimore’sTowson University (with 13,000 under-graduates and 5,000 graduate students,the second-largest public liberal artsuniversity in Maryland), implementingiStrategy a year ago to work with theschool’s Oracle PeopleSoft suite provedto be a good solution. In the fall of 2002,Towson had moved from a legacy sys-tem to Oracle PeopleSoft 8.0, accordingto Phil Adams, assistant director ofinformation systems at the university.Before PeopleSoft, staff members need-ing reports had used Business Objects’Crystal Reports reporting tool to create

their own reports as needed from data inthe legacy system.

With PeopleSoft in place, Adamssays, users were sometimes frustratedby their lack of reporting capability andend-user tools, and the need to rely onthe IT staff for reports and queries. Thatwas a key driver in the choice of iStrat-egy: giving faculty,staff, and deans easyaccess to data. Theschool also wanted asingle version ofinformation—andthe same answerevery time the data was queried. “Wehad Crystal Reports, Access, [Frontier]ODBC Query, and 16,000 PeopleSofttables,” Adams says. “Users could askthe same question and get two, three,four different answers.”

Consider ROI. Towson originallylooked at several large data warehousingproducts. But a major advantage withiStrategy, Adams says, was that it wasn’tonly a data warehouse product; it also hada very simple user interface for reportingand analytics. A real deal-maker for theIT exec was the return on investment hesaw in the out-of-the-box product. “Froman ROI standpoint, the time, resources,and staffing that we put into this is veryminimal,” he reports.

After he’d rolled out iStrategy,Adams attended the Higher Education

Data Warehousing Forum (www.sunysb.edu/offires/hedw), begun in 2003 andheld this year on the campus of the Uni-versity of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.(The conference Adams attended washeld in April 2005 at NorthwesternUniversity in Evanston, Illinois; ws.cc.sunysb.edu/offires/hedw/previous2.

html.) He attendedpresentations in whichuniversity technolo-gists discussed spend-ing several years andmillions of dollars ondata warehousing and

business intelligence solutions. “WhenI heard the money projections, [esti-mates] were in the millions,” Adamsrecalls. “I couldn’t have justified it atTowson.”

With its prebuilt reports, and the man-ner in which the warehouse and report-ing tools are packaged together, for themost part iStrategy was up and runningat Towson within a week, Adams says. “Irealized then that it was a very powerfultool. Now, looking back, I just feel for-tunate we found the right solution for ourneeds.”

Linda L. Briggs (formerly a senior edi-torial director for this company) is afreelance writer based in San Diego.She covers technology in corporate,education, and government markets.

GIVING FACULTY, staff, and deans easy access to data was a key business intelligence driver foradministrators at Towson University.

“The ROI on an out-of-the-box

DW/BI product was a real deal-maker

for us.”—PHIL ADAMS,

ASSISTANT DIRECTOR OF INFORMATION SYSTEMS,

TOWSON UNIVERSITY

WEBEXTRAYour DW solution is in place.Now, how to secure it? Seewww.campus-technology.com/article.asp?id=17886.

(#13202) Adapted with permission from the November 2006 issue of Campus Technology. Copyright 2006 1105 Media, Inc. For more information about reprints from Campus Technology, please contact PARS International Corp. at 212-221-9595.