University of Washington

B U I L D IN G A FOUNDATION FOR THE FUTURE The HR/Payroll Modernization project involved more than 300 UW staff in redesigning HR and payroll business processes to inform selection of a new HR/Payroll system; two finalist vendors gave demos. UW Profiles, a new set of institutional dashboards, offers a dynamic way to access, explore and understand basic UW data. The first release this fall provides academic data. Created by the Office of Planning & Budgeting with UW-IT, UW Profiles uses Tableau data visualization software to provide access to the Enterprise Data Warehouse, UW's source of major institutional data. New Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) resources provide better access to institutional data. In addition to UW Profiles and Tableau software, these include a new Business Intelligence portal with central reports and analytics, and training opportunities. The EDW has added data on research administration for analyzing research awards, academics including courses taught and course/section size and student credit hours. CISO provides significantly enhanced data security. The UW Office of the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) published a new University-wide policy on Information Security Controls and Operational Practices (APS 2.6), provided social media and encryption guidelines and expanded security and privacy online training. It also improved UW NetID abuse detection and mitigation to help safeguard UW institutional information. A new UW Indoor Alert system provides emergency audio and/or reader board notifications in most UW Seattle buildings, augmenting the outdoor public address system. A new mass-notification solution for UW Alert is speeding up email and text delivery and automatically updates the UW Alert Facebook and Twitter pages. more info UW-IT Decision Support uw.edu/uwit/im/ds UW Profiles uwprofiles.uw.edu HR/P Modernization f2.uw.edu/teams/hrp UW Office of the Chief Information Security Officer ciso.uw.edu Geographic redundancy for UW's critical business systems, part of the UW's business continuity plan, is halfway completed. This is a five-year effort to build out a data center in Eastern Washington and at remote cloud locations. Ben Robinson, School of Public Health CFO, uses Tableau to create a clear picture of his School. To make EDW data easy to access and use, UW-IT also hosts more than 200 custom, fully interactive reports loaded with previously unavailable aggregate data from human resources, payroll, admissions, research administration, finance and more. It also created one research and three financial "cubes" packed with biennium data that can be "sliced and diced" and used to create visual representations that highlight historical trends. "The tool is just the tip of the iceberg," she said. "The bulk of the effort is incurred in gathering, integrating, organizing, modeling and defining the data." Providing access to valid, defined data from the EDW lowers the barrier to effective decision-making, she said. This is an important step toward uniform, agreed-upon institutional data and analytics at the UW, based on a single source of central administrative data. "It's a whole new way of working with data." "There are so many 'aha' moments that happen when people start using the drag-and-drop functionality of these tools through the new Business Intelligence portal," said Ann Wunderlin, Education and Communication Manager for UW-IT's Enterprise Data & Analytics. As one user told her, "Manipulating data used to be like pushing a shopping cart, but now it's like driving a Ferrari." To increase transparency and confidence in the data, UW-IT has been careful to design all its new tools to be easy to "look under the hood" to confirm the underlying raw data is complete and correct, CanfieldBudde explained. Because the data in the EDW is definitive, one of the most powerful impacts of these tools has been their ability to "myth bust," Robinson said. "With Activity Based Budgeting, it's very important that decisions are made with facts. In the past, we often had to deal with assumptions that could be difficult to check. Now it's simple." There are other, less expected benefits as well. "With each interaction, each visualization, you learn new things, and frequently fork off in new directions that deepen your understanding," Robinson said. "It's a whole new way of working with data." 2013 ANNUAL REPORT 5

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