You Get What You Pay For

1
You Get What You Pay For

• Building and Institutional Data Warehouse

2
About-IA

• IAs role is to support the planning and decision
  making processes through the collection and
  dissemination of information

3
Why Build a DW

• Increasing demands for more timely info
• Provide multiple perspectives of the same
  information

4
Why Build a DW (cont'd)

• Increasing Amounts of Data
• Current Methods and Tools not adequate for the
  task

5
Why Build a DW (cont'd)

• Funding is decreasing and the institution needs
  to make difficult funding decisions.
• Senior Admin want to be able to defend their
  decisions Repeatable processes

6
What IA Built

• Ralph Kimball defines a Data Warehouse as
• The conglomeration of an organization's data
  warehouse staging and presentation areas, where
  operational data is specifically structured for
  query and analysis performance and ease-of-use

7
What IA Built (cont'd)

• An environment called iDAT (Institutional
  Data Analysis Tool) consisting of

8
What IA Built (cont'd)

• Web presentation area.
• People can visit www.usask.ca/ia/statistics and
  see a variety of web reports that are linked to
  dynamic data sets.

9
What IA Built (cont'd)

• Multiple Data Staging areas
• Devel
• User Test
• Production

10
What IA Built (cont'd)

• Cubes which are used for data exploration,
  verification and analysis

11
What Did IA Gain

• Quality and reliability.
• Complex Business Rules moved into repeatable ETL
  processes.

12
What Did IA Gain (cont'd)

• Faster turn around time for information requests
  and data availability.
• Oct head count data available in 5 working days.
  Historically 60-80 days for paper publication
  (then wait for the annual printed publication).

13
What Did IA Gain (cont'd)

• Analyst freed up from manual publication
  production to perform research, respond to
  requests or perform data analysis.

14
What did IA Learn

• It is critical to focus on data extraction and
  transformation.
• It is critical to build multiple environments.

15
What did IA Learn

• Increases in timeliness, productivity and
  reduction of manual effort has been replaced with
  increased long term infrastructure costs.

16
The End

• Onto the Demonstration of iDat and the public
  interface into University of Saskatchewan facts.
• The best is yet to come