Suneetha Vaitheswaran
Director, Business Information Services
University of Chicago
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Founded 1892 by John D. Rockefeller
12,000 students, 56% grad students
11 Schools & Divisions
2,200 faculty
150,000 alumni
$466M sponsored research
$6.6B endowment
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Sell the initiative and get funding
Procure tools, platform, and architecture
Design the bus matrix
Build and integrate each subject area
Create additional targeted data marts
Celebrate your EDW!
Add dashboards
Move into predictive analytics
Refresh your architecture
Work on Big Data
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 Institution
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Hit hard by the economic downturn
Continued aggressive growth
87 Nobel Prize winners, extremely faculty-driven
Pushback on admin staff and processes
Executives demanding data for decision-making
 Systems
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Hundreds of legacy and silo’d source systems
Inconsistent, bottoms-up business processes
Erratic data stewardship
Nonstop demand for feeds
 Dispersed
team
 One size for all users = ad-hoc
 Architecture and maintenance projects
 No new subject areas in years
 Many separate Business Objects systems
 Limited partnerships
 Consultants defining strategy for reporting
 BIS formalized late in 2007
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Team building
Hired slowly, but got great folks
 Realigned team
 Leveraged ownership of stack: architecture through support
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“Coordinate reporting approaches into an enterprise-wide,
streamlined solution”
Took over admin of all BO systems
 Began managing consultants
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“Provide easy-to-use and flexible access to data”
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“Use consistent best practice methods & tools”
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Began revamp of training – short modules vs. day-long
Redo of DW/ETL architecture a big success
“Partner for progress and data governance”
Started Stewardship Council
 Registrar: Student data warehouse
 New Research system: Grants data warehouse
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 Login
to one place for reporting
 Similar look/feel across subject areas
 Support different user skill levels
 Training a means to an end
 High performance and availability
 Consider integration points
 Committed
to multiple projects at a time
 Implemented best practice consolidated
architecture for Business Objects
 Teams coalesced
 Focused on standards and process including
coordinating SDLC with PMO
 Brought SMEs in earlier
 Acknowledged surprises and new priorities
Services
Users
Custom
security
User
training
KB
Provides Central office administrators, Dean’s offices, and academic department administrators
with standard reporting packages and ability generate custom reports to manage financial
operations and administer grants. Also used for ARRA and F&A compliance reporting
800
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FAS
Specialized applications that map and categorize financial transactions to drive annual financial
statement reporting (Matrix) and budget category reporting (OBS). Now also used by divisions and
academic units, and feeds Delphi
200
X
X
X
Payroll and EDBdetailed payroll
transactions
Provides Central office administrators, Dean’s offices, and academic department administrators
with standard biweekly and monthly reporting packages, and ability to generate custom reports to
reconcile payroll operations, including managing restricted funds
450
X
X
X
EDB and PAF
Provides Dean’s offices, and academic department HR and Grant administrators with standard
reporting packages and ability generate custom reports to develop account projections, integrating
pay history forecasting of pay to accounts
120
X
X
X
IRF-Financial, OBS,
HR
Provides the central Budget Office and ‘Exec Levels’ with Budget and Salary planning applications
for provide comprehensive planning, entry, forecasting, and reporting
60
X
X
X
AURA Grants DW
AURA (Click) Full
Grants
Provides Central office administrators (URA), Dean’s offices, and academic department
administrators with standard reporting packages and ability generate custom reports to track and
manage proposals and awards
380
X
X
X
AURA IRB DW
AURA (Click) IRB
Provides Central office administrators (IRB directors and staff), department chairs and
administrators with standard reporting packages and ability generate custom reports to track and
manage sponsored research protocols
150
X
X
X
SDW Graduate
Teaching
Gargoyle
Provides Provost office, Deans of Students, and department administrators with standard reporting
packages and ability generate custom reports to track and manage doctoral student teaching for
GAI and non-GAI students
100
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X
SDW Enrollment,
Person
Gargoyle, IRF HR
Provides Central office administrators (President, Provost, CSL), Deans of Students, and department
administrators with standard reporting packages and ability generate custom reports to track and
analyze student enrollments and demographics
120
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X
BO Pilot /Student
Gargoyle, IRF HR
Provides Central office administrators (President, Provost, CSL), and Deans of Students with access
to student enrollment, financial aid , and billing data for reporting and analysis
70
Service
IRF Financial
IRF Matrix, OBS
IRF Payroll
IRF HR
Delphi Budget
Planning
BO Pilot /Applicant
Data Source
FAS - transaction and
subaccount detail
OGSA
Key Functionality
Provides graduate admissions offices with OGSA applicant information for reporting
40
X
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X
9
 High
demand from senior stakeholders
 New app projects include BI
 Capital projects requested by steward
 PMO partners with BIS regularly
 Good relationships with functional areas
 User base increasing 10-15% year
 Better understanding of what it takes
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BI Strategy must address:
Current State: Turn challenges into opportunities
 The Culture: Will introduce constraints
 Defined Benefits: Introduce some structure
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BI Strategy must be:
Feasible: Balance user with architecture projects
 User-focused: Not all users happy
 Sustainable: Build solid stuff, resource load projects
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BI Strategy must overcome:
Perception: Deliver good stuff
 Partnership challenges: Strong team, better selling
 Reality: Deliverables create more demand
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 Marketing
opportunities come in ways you
may only recognize when they come up, so
be ready
 Planning happens all the time – always
connect the dots and keep user focus
paramount. The vision will come more easily.
 Doing it means mapping planned and
unplanned efforts into a whole program, and
continually realigning the pieces to make
sense to you, team, stakeholders
 Over-committed
 Very
little redundancy across team
 Tools: Monitoring, ETL, Metadata
 Tipped too far to user deliverables
 Not yet EDW (integration)
 No time to redo original (financial & payroll)
 Get to visualization, analytics, big data
 Strategy when ERP shows up?
 The Hospital
 Little abatement of local systems
 We
can’t wait so just give me a feed…
 Wow, the source data is terrible!
 This new system needs reporting, do that next.
 Oh, there is no consistent business process…
 This financial DW is for operational reporting.
 We have how many separate BO systems??
 Provost needs that reporting app ASAP…
 Our architecture has been off vendor support
for how many years?
 You have BO, you don’t need a bigger team..
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BI Strategy must address:
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BI Strategy must be:
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Current State
The Culture
Defined Benefits
Feasible
User-focused
Sustainable
BI Strategy must overcome:
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Perception
Partnership challenges
Reality
 BO
environments a mess
 Diversion from student DW to grad reporting
 Sluggish Stewardship efforts
 Adapting DW/BI to PMO SDLC
 Team challenges
 Always asking for a seat at the table
 No time to build conformed dimensions
 Deliverables
are solid
 Structure and accountability in projects
 CITO implements governance and planning
 ITIL improved IT partner understanding
 Pounded team on communication & user focus
 Bosses very supportive
 No ERP elevates criticality of DW/BI
DW/BI apps: Financial, Payroll, HR, Grants, IRB,
Enrollment/Person, Graduate Teaching
 EPM: Budget Planning and Management
 Single consolidated BO environment
 1700 users
 In progress: Expense, COI, Registration
 Self-service access (viewer, analyst, power user)
 Standard reporting packages plus ad-hoc
 Platforms: Power Designer, Oracle db, OWB,
VPD, AD, ESP, Business Objects, Hyperion
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 Broad
span of control
 Structured projects
 Resource loading
 Amazing team
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Self-service access to core administrative reporting that decreases report requests to IT
and central business offices
Single point of user entry to reporting applications over and across multiple data
areas, using common ‘business intelligence’ tools and access methods
Consistent look and feel of reporting applications across different data areas
Reporting design and deliverables that serve user types from casual to advanced
Common training and support model tiered to effectively deliver training and help to
various users types, and coordinated with other systems and stewards
‘Smart’ models that organize data for reporting, resolve some source inconsistencies,
and add context/help to simplify analysis and creation of new reports
Support of historical analysis and trending to enable projections and data-driven
decisions, even after source system history is purged
Integrated reporting to support analysis across and within each business process
lifecycle to answer critical questions regarding instruction and research
Enhanced value of source applications by deploying reporting tool functionality to
support effective data analysis and decision support (e.g. drilldown, linking ‘like’
reports, slice/dice, dynamic filtering)
Fast data retrieval that does not impact performance of transaction systems
Best practice architecture for data warehouse and user interface that is flexible,
extensible, and high-performing