Utah Valley University Presents a Vision for Cohesive Institutional Reporting
State-Run University Uses WebFOCUS to Revolutionize Information Access, Analysis, and Exchange
With thousands of new students each year, dozens of separate departments asking for distinct reports, and an ongoing need for secure, accurate information, Utah Valley University (UVU) faces a daunting set of information technology (IT) challenges. Information Builders’ WebFOCUS business intelligence (BI) platform is helping the university to meet these challenges in a consistent, economical way.
"We have a variety of departments demanding unique information that’s relevant to their specific roles within the university," says Joe Belnap, senior director of Administrative Computing for UVU. “But in the end, all of these different data points inevitably intersect. For example, admissions information trickles down to affect everything from enrollment numbers to classroom allocation. Having one cohesive reporting environment for all of these different areas is vital to improving efficiency campus-wide.”
By investing in WebFOCUS and devising an organization-wide strategy for business intelligence, Belnap and his team find themselves on the brink of an IT revolution. UVU is creating a unified BI environment that puts intuitive reporting, based on real-time data, into the hands of key decision-makers throughout the university.
Researching Information Technology Options
Utah Valley University is a state-run, regional university that enrolls 80 percent of Utah County’s college-bound high school graduates, in addition to a bustling international and out-of-state student population. It’s a vibrant university that depends on an IT staff of ten full-time workers to provide students, faculty, staff members, and government offices with the data, reports, and information they need.
In an effort to leverage the university’s SunGard Banner ERP system and accompanying Oracle database, the IT team sought reporting tools that could easily access, analyze, and distribute information in its system, operational data store (ODS), and enterprise data warehouse (EDW). The university’s IT department also had a few shadow databases that had to be tied into the new system if they couldn’t eliminate or consolidate them.
“Previously, we didn’t have a user-friendly reporting environment with this degree of flexibility,” says Robert Johnson, senior Oracle developer for UVU. “We had experience with FOCUS, so when Information Builders contacted us and told us about WebFOCUS, we were intrigued. We wanted reports that customers could manipulate easily.”
Since the university population includes people from a variety of backgrounds that range from the executive level down to the student population, the IT department needs a business intelligence environment that casual users can understand as easily as IT professionals.
According to Belnap, other BI vendors could also simplify Banner reporting, but their products were too generic for the university’s needs. “We have a variety of customers who can gain a lot from using WebFOCUS, including faculty and staff in financial aid, finance, student services, and human resources,” he says. “Information Builders won our business not only because they had a better end-user environment, but also because the people who work for [the company] were more responsive, more helpful, and friendlier than the competition.”
Moving Up the Learning Curve
Since purchasing WebFOCUS in the fall of 2008, the university has developed a concrete vision for pervasive reporting throughout the institution. The ultimate goal is to enable functional customers and researchers to run and customize their own reports instead of always relying on the IT staff.
"Our primary interest is in streamlining and improving the Banner reporting against the ODS and EDW, as well as in building dashboards for the executive level," said Belnap. "We also need to provide accurate metrics to state funding agencies, and to be able to track and monitor enrollment. By giving our functional customers the ability to run their own reports, we free up our developers and empower key decision-makers to make important business decisions. The time savings and increased efficiency alone should make a huge difference in the way UVU is run."
To help them master WebFOCUS Developer Studio, the university hosted two on-site training sessions with help from Information Builders Professional Services. The training included people from the development team, institutional research, and at least one person from each functional area.
Many reporting projects are now under way. For example, one staff member developed parameterized reports for looking up old invoices and payments. Formerly there was no way to access this archival information in the ODS. Now the finance department can access this data on demand. Users can select particular vendors and then drill down to relevant information about purchase orders, payments, and vendor records, enabling the finance team to better manage all of the university’s vendor relationships.
Belnap and his team look forward to the day when every department on campus can run their own reports, optimizing stored information and freeing up valuable time. Informational research reports to secure state funding are a good example. Currently, staff members must accumulate massive quantities of data by pulling together aggregate information about students, courses, and other key metrics to determine the appropriate level of funding. Although this information is critical to the daily operation and long-term functioning of the university, the organization’s old reporting system didn’t supply standard reports that include the necessary data. Gathering, summarizing, and delivering this information with WebFOCUS will save hours of tedious data mining that the staff used to perform by hand.
Devising a Well-Rounded Reporting Curriculum
The university also foresees deploying WebFOCUS Active Reports to give users an intuitive way to analyze pre-selected subsets of data. This unique and highly portable BI technology allows the university to e-mail interactive reports to people who are not connected to the reporting server, or even to the Web. The recipients don’t need to have a WebFOCUS software license or a connection to the server environment. Each Active Report includes an HTML-based analytical engine so users can view, sort, and manipulate the included data through a standard Web browser, even when they are offline.
“They don’t even have to access our database to run Active Reports,” says Belnap. “We can just send them the required data and let them manipulate it. Customers get what they are looking for without leaning on the IT department.”
Meanwhile, WebFOCUS dashboards will enable managers to keep track of finances, student information, and a variety of other metrics depending on each department’s needs. For example, while the financial aid department is interested in dispersing scholarships to students, student affairs is more concerned with enrollment and application metrics. Because WebFOCUS offers native access to data in the Banner ERP suite, it preserves the data relationships and enforces data quality, enabling each department to store, retrieve, and link information in a consistent way.
As Johnson points out, having one cohesive reporting environment for all of these domains helps the university maximize efficiency, reduce costs, and improve student services across all departments.
"Part of the reason we have an enterprise data warehouse is so we can create more accurate and efficient forecasts," he explains. "We hope WebFOCUS will enable customers to look at the forecast, examine their current data, and compare it with previous years so they can identify trends within their respective departments. This will give us better insight into how we can use those metrics to help the organization stay on track each year."
The university has a variety of other reports in development that will maximize efficiency throughout the organization. For example, reports on space utilization will examine how the different colleges within the university are using their classrooms, lecture halls, and offices so they can match enrollment numbers to classroom sizes, and ensure that popular courses don’t overflow the space allotted to them.
They are also developing an audit report that works in conjunction with other university processes to determine which students qualify for certain financial aid awards. Still other reports will examine the academic performance of athletes to determine if they’ve met the required criteria to play on university teams.
As Utah Valley University devises a business intelligence environment to support everyone from the university president to department heads, staff members, academics, and students, having a unified reporting environment will lend cohesion to the entire institution.
"We’re looking to WebFOCUS reports to identify patterns, stay on top of trends, and make meaningful decisions based on actionable data that is specific to each person’s role at the university,” says Johnson.