UF Reporting/Data Warehouse Strategy

Transcription

1 UF Reporting/Data Warehouse Strategy D RAFT S TATEMENT OF D IRECTION D ECEMBER 15, 2002 Summary The University of Florida will have an enterprise wide reporting strategy based on a comprehensive data warehouse, self-service access and common tools. The data warehouse will contain data regarding finances, employees, students, grants, facilities, assets and inventory. Data will be available in summarized and detailed formats to simplify use. The data warehouse will be built and managed using the PeopleSoft Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) system. The data warehouse will contain both current and historical data. The data warehouse will be accessible by all UF units and will enable unit-level reporting and use of data. The data warehouse will support role-based access to data and information. The practice of providing centrally produced reports along with printing and distribution of these reports will be replaced with self service, on-demand report creation. Reports may be downloaded, customized, and delivered directly to the user s desktop via a web browser. This approach improves access and reduces costs. UF has acquired the Cognos Business Intelligence and Reporting Suite to provide all units with a common set of supported tools for building and accessing reports. The Cognos tools include web-based access to frequently used reports as well as sophisticated options for units to produce customized reports. UF units have asked for better access to quality data for many years. The UF Reporting/Data Warehouse Strategy, in conjunction with ERP implementation, will provide self-service access to quality data for all units. Background The university has not previously pursued a formal enterprise reporting strategy. Common reporting tools, report collections and information warehouses for all areas 1 of 6

2 have not been available to the university at large. Units selected reporting tools and techniques individually. Each area would develop their own databases, write reports and models in a unique tool, and provide little if any assistance to others who needed similar information. Often, the data needed for reporting was not available in electronic form and data entry was performed locally. UF currently has some data warehouse capabilities and these have provided useful initial explorations, served the community well, and demonstrated the value of building information value chains. These efforts have generated discussion and effort related to security, views of data, completeness of data, needs for additional data, and acquisition of data. These early warehouses are typically database tables collected and updated by the IT unit responsible for the functional system. This has led to an initial understanding of the need and desire for users to access, create and run reports on their own. For example, Manage Your UF Money, provides primitive prompted query and drill through capability. All such efforts at UF have been programming intensive and use a variety of tools with few if any standards, resulting in maintenance delays and high operational costs. One of the visions for the UF ERP implementation is to create an Information Value Chain at the University of Florida. UF can leverage the changes brought about by the new systems to create ready access to information across the university using a consistent set of supported tools. This is the goal of the EPM implementation. The EPM will provide for production based extraction and loading of the reporting database, the data warehouse, and OLAP cubes. UF can satisfy external agency reporting needs, answer adhoc requests by administrative staffs, develop historical perspectives of the university, and make projections of what is to come. Currently these tasks are taken on by the very few staff members who have the vast amounts of institutional knowledge required to find and process existing university data. The data exist on various systems and in various formats and must be accessed using a wide variety of tools. The EPM when accessed using Cognos tools will dramatically simplify the production and consumption of accurate data reports and summaries. Some universities have taken this approach very seriously as a means to reduce IT costs and increase the effectiveness of their organizations as a whole. The University of Minnesota (UM) has implemented Information Value Chain processes across their entire campus. UM has addressed areas of enterprise reporting and created an environment tuned for fast report response measured in delivery within just a few seconds. These reports support operational, management and executive level users. Enterprise data warehousing is also being supported at UM. The focus for the data warehouse is optimization for easy ad hoc access to detailed, summarized and analytic views of data. All departments at UM are provided access to the UM information delivery and value chain system. See Figure 1. 2 of 6

3 Figure 1. University of Minnesota Information Value Chain At a recent Educause seminar, UM staff described the following benefits of their reporting strategy. - Facilitates flexible, low cost, and fast information solutions that facilitate continuous improvement to accommodate changing information needs and user preferences. - Shifts cost from high cost transactional platforms to lower cost platforms to optimize and make more predictable transaction response times for the ERP system. - Provides iterative enhancements in information access in an affordable manner to a dynamic and ever changing organization. - Provides more and better use of information for more users in a more diverse and broad set of organizations. - Provides known data sources since enterprise reports are derived from the data warehouse. - Provides web based access to enterprise reports on the portal. - Meets the view-only needs of many users of the ERP through web-based reports and thus reduces concurrency on the ERP transactional servers, improving transactional response time and lowering costs for hardware for transactional systems. 3 of 6

4 - Provides an opportunity to use alternative delivery mechanisms for reports such as . - Utilizes functional experts and business intelligence tools in lieu of IT developers. This reduces time and cost for producing information. - Reduces the need for ad hoc programming. - Reduces printing (central printing is drastically reduced) as most viewing is moved to the desktop and printed only as needed. - Paper distribution costs are decreased. - Increases the use of data as end users can download and reformat, manipulate reports in an integrated manner using common desktop software. - Transfers the customization effort in the ERP to reports in many cases. This greatly reduces the cost of implementing the ERP and maintaining costly customizations through the system s life. - Reduces the total number of required reports by provided role-based access to smart reports - who you are determines what you see. Execution Management Data warehouse design, content conversion and loading will be done by the UF ERP EPM team. The UF ERP EPM User Advisory Council will provide recommendations and early feedback. Data warehouse integration will be coordinated by OIT Data Infrastructure. Oversight will be provided by ITAC Data Infrastructure. Content The data warehouse will contain an Operational Data Store (ODS) as defined by the PeopleSoft EPM. The ODS is a grouping of tables used for staging and operational reporting. The ODS tables are a copy of the transactional database environment brought to a single database for information delivery. The data warehouse will contain a Reporting Data Store (RDS) as defined by the PeopleSoft EPM. This is a simplified version of the ODS optimized for standard reporting needs. The data warehouse will contain summaries of business objects as defined by the PeopleSoft EPM. PeopleSoft refers to this aggregation and historical capture of 4 of 6

5 operational data as a data warehouse. Typically data regarding students, employees, and fiscal affairs are summarized and preprocessed for ease of use and analysis. The data warehouse will contain multi-dimensional summaries of data as defined by the PeopleSoft EPM. These summaries will be accessible to data warehouse users through OLAP (Online Analytic Processing) tools from Cognos. The data warehouse will contain legacy data (data existing before the PeopleSoft implementation) in formats as described above. Design Tools The data warehouse will support an information value chain providing transformations from raw data to summarized information appropriate for decisionmaking and reporting at many levels throughout the university. The University of Minnesota has produced a diagram (See Figure 1) which serves as a rough template of the value chain envisioned for UF. The actual details of the UF data warehouse design and technologies to be used will be developed by the EPM Team. The warehouse will be implemented using PeopleSoft Enterprise Performance Management (EPM). The warehouse will be stored and managed using the same relational database management system (RDBMS) as the online transaction processing (OLTP) system. This will lower licensing costs and system administration costs. The Cognos Business Intelligence and Reporting Suite has been selected for creation and access to reports from the data warehouse. The Cognos Suite includes Impromptu for web reports, PowerPlay for web-based OLAP access, Cognos Query, Visualizer Web, Cognos Metrics Manager and Noticecast Web. See the Cognos web site ( for additional information on these tools. The tools will be available to all units on campus and most users will need only their web browsers to access the reporting tools. Web access to the reporting environment and data warehouse will be provided via the UF portal. Access Access to the data warehouse will be managed using PeopleSoft roles. Users will have access to appropriate data and information from the data warehouse as determined by their roles. Policy regarding access will be developed. The intent is to provide broad access to promote information-based decision-making in keeping with the security requirements of the University. Hosting Timeline The portal will be hosted by the Northeast Regional Data Center. A production data warehouse comprised of current legacy data will be available on or before July 1, of 6

6 Development of the data warehouse will continue throughout the ERP implementation. As phased implementation of modules occurs, corresponding elements of the data warehouse will be added. Incorporation of legacy data from all/any source to the data warehouse will be scheduled as needed. Reporting Principles Business knowledge is essential to effective reporting solutions. Business processes determine information delivered. Business use of information determines the functionality available in the reporting solution. Reports are created as a means to deliver information to solve business problems. Do not recreate reports from legacy systems design new processes with new information requirements. Use data warehouse reports to support and reinforce business process change. Build reports that automatically navigate the data and filter for a specific user s needs based on the user s role within the enterprise. Put end users in control and respond to their business needs. Recognize the need for change and use an iterative design strategy to support continuous improvement. Take advantage of the capability for reports to integrate and reconcile information from multiple modules or systems. 6 of 6