Once Upon a Time: The Story of a Successful BI Implementation Lisa Newman, Senior Software Engineer Rachael Coombes, Business Intelligence Specialist

About Wellesley College Liberal arts women’s college founded in 1870 Located in Wellesley, MA (12 miles west of Boston) Enrollment of ~2300 students Offers 56 different majors 7:1 student-faculty ratio

Presentation Agenda Goal: Agenda: Share strategies for developing a Business Intelligence (BI) implementation plan for purchased solutions Agenda: What is Business Intelligence? Business Analytics demo (Pyramid Analytics) Where we are and how we got here Successes and challenges

Defining Business Intelligence TDWI: “Business intelligence (BI) unites data, technology, analytics, and human knowledge to optimize business decisions and ultimately drive an enterprise’s success.”1 Started with this BI definition: Self-Service Business Analytics Data Driven Decision Making Transitioned into including this in BI definition: Operational Reporting 1 The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI): https://tdwi.org/portals/business-intelligence.aspx

Audience Poll What stage of BI Implementation are you in? Exploring the potential of BI Just starting Technical implementation: at least one content area Functional roll-outs: users are actively using the BI analytical/reporting tools If your Institution has a BI system… …is it a purchased solution? …is it a custom built system?

Purchased BI Solution: Blackboard Analytics (BBA) BBA modules implemented: Student, Admissions, Financial Aid and Finance Optimized & structured for analysis/reporting: slicing, dicing, drill up/down, roll-ups, etc. Contains data architecture and data structures that allow for multi-dimensional analysis Descriptive analytics “The first stage of business analytics is descriptive analytics, which still accounts for the majority of all business analytics today.[5] Descriptive analytics answers the questions what happened and why did it happen. Descriptive analytics looks at past performance and understands that performance by mining historical data to look for the reasons behind past success or failure.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prescriptive_analytics) “The next phase is predictive analytics. Predictive analytics answers the question what will happen. This is when historical performance data is combined with rules, algorithms, and occasionally external data to determine the probable future outcome of an event or the likelihood of a situation occurring.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prescriptive_analytics)

Analytical/ Reporting Purchased BI Solution Banner Database (Oracle) Data Warehouse (SQL Server DB – Star Schema design) OLAP Cubes (SQL Server Analysis Studio) Analytical/ Reporting Toolsl Extract Process Transform Logic Centralized Data Definitions Blackboard Analytics Processing: 1. Source data extracted from Banner DB to Data Warehouse DB 2. Data Transformed (business rules) from staging into final tables 3. Processed into cube designed to facilitate multi-dimensional analysis

(Business Analytics Demo) Data In Action (Business Analytics Demo)

Screenshot of Demo

BI Implementation: Business Focused Business focused project, not a technology-centered project Understanding the data and the business needs: now and forthcoming Actionable, dynamic and accessible data "Framing" BI Project Can be a significant culture change. for Business Users

Key Project Areas Sponsorship & Championing Project Data Definitions & Customizations Data Governance & Data Quality Dashboard Roll-outs User Adoption & Looking Forward

Student Implementation Overview 2012 2013 2014 2015 ∙ BBA Student install ∙ Data Definitions ∙ Gap Analysis ∙ Data Verifications ∙ BI Advisory Committee ∙ Project name: WANDA ∙ Data Definitions ∙ Customizations ∙ Data Verifications ∙ Data Quality ∙ Data Workflows ∙ Analytical Tool Assessment ∙ Training Agile PM ∙ Pyramid usage ∙ Prototypes ∙ IR and Admissions Roll-outs ∙ SSRS install ∙ On-going data definitions training ∙ Customizations ∙ Data Quality ∙ Dashboard Roll-outs: Faculty, Academic Depts., Humanities, etc. ∙ Upgrade Student ∙ BBA FinAid install ∙ Data Governance ∙ Pyramid upgrade ∙ SQL Server upgrade

Student Implementation Timeline (2013) FUNCTIONAL TECHNICAL

Sponsorship & Championing Project Project name: WANDA Wellesley ANalytics Decision-Support Applications Finding partners on campus

Data Definitions & Customizations Centralized Data Definitions Creating customizations for BBA standard definitions “One source of the truth” Example: What is an Enrolled Student? On-Campus? Study Abroad? Matrics? Non-Matrics? Etc. Asking users to adopt a different truth (in comparison to their own records)

Data Governance & Data Quality Data Governance structure: - WANDA Advisory Committee - Functional Working Groups - Technical Working Groups Security Policies: Data Access Data Quality: roles of Data Custodians and Data Stewards Census Snapshots Security Data Matrix (example)

Dashboard Roll-outs Be flexible in your training methods User documentation, group sessions, 1-on-1 deskside training Build prototypes and interactive dashboards Get people excited about data early on!

User Adoption & Looking Forward Once you have something people like, it explodes!

Reminder: Complete your session evaluations by April 8th Contact Information Lisa Newman Senior Software Engineer lnewman@wellesley.edu Rachael Coombes Business Intelligence Specialist rcoombes@wellesley.edu Reminder: Complete your session evaluations by April 8th