University of Washington

Transforming how we do business Bringing all the University's data together— and transforming how it can be used— promises to revolutionize the way we do business Assistant Dean Lawrie Robertson takes advantage of data warehouse tools to make better decisions. A Single Source of Truth I t was budgeting time at UW's School of Public Health, and Assistant Dean for Administration Lawrie Robertson had a couple of basic questions. "What would happen to revenue if we raised tuition 10 percent? What would happen if we raised enrollment by 10 percent?" he asked. "With our current data systems, it's surprisingly challenging to find the answers. It takes a lot of blood, sweat and tears." Fortunately, a better solution is underway. That solution is to bring the vast amounts of data collected across the University into a single repository—the Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW)—envisioned as "the single source of truth" for all UW data. Currently, the effort is focused on migrating key institutional data administered by the Office of Planning & Budgeting, a major step in delivering strategic reports of trends, key metrics and longitudinal data across subject areas. Bill Yock, UW-IT's director of Enterprise Information Services, whose team is leading the effort, explained that after this work completes in 2013, UW-IT will migrate data from other legacy systems, retrieving, connecting and translating invaluable information. The full spectrum will include everything from advancement to student demographics, human resources to administrative research, financial data to space use and more. While migration of Planning & Budgeting data is still in process, the EDW's current huge dataset—and new ways of accessing it—is already having a significant impact across the University. 2 UW INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY Users can now download more than 200 canned reports containing previously unavailable data on finance, payroll, admissions and much more. Some 5,000 users currently access these reports, about 25,000 times per quarter. The data in the reports is refreshed regularly, and new reports are being added all the time. For more in-depth analysis, new tools called Financial Activity Cubes offer a great alternative. The cubes use the familiar Microsoft Excel interface and allow users to quickly and easily "slice and dice" financial data in powerful ways. Users can ask multi-dimensional questions, generating information by fiscal year, by organization and by budget. "We were one of the first schools to dig into cubes, and it has really changed the way we do business," Robertson said. "It's intuitive, and allows us to look across a number of related budgets rather than just one budget at a time. We use it on an almost daily basis. A lot of questions that used to be extremely difficult to answer are much, much easier thanks to the cubes." "With the Warehouse and these new tools, we'll be able to look at many years of past data," Yock said. "We will get valuable insights for planning purposes in ways not possible today." Robertson agrees. "The more reliable your data is, the more people have confidence in it. That spreads confidence into other areas—your research, all the work you're doing. That's why we're so strongly behind the EDW," he said. "We believe the full development of the EDW is absolutely essential to our ability to manage."

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