Luna Rajbhandari Manager, Business Intelligence Solutions Business Intelligence Solutions

Summary  In November of 2007, the Business Intelligence team was officially formed with the hiring of the BI Manager and development of an overall team structure.  The BI Manager and the Lead Architect met with various potential and current BI customers to assess current needs and expectations from the BI tool in the University.  Planning was initiated for the BI team to position itself as the BI Competency Center within the University with centralized product management.

FY08 Activities  Discovery Phase for BI  Ongoing support: Project Café, HRIS (Position Management), IR (Faculty reports for Provost’s office)  Initiate BI pilot for CCM in Office for Research  Initiate BI pilot for Feinberg  Technical Infrastructure planning and implementations  Security implementations  Create NUBI user group and engage community of BI users

FY08 Activities: Training:  BI team is partnering with Future State LLC to provide Cognos training to community.  First round of on-site training for 12 individuals from Feinberg, OFR, HRIS and IR on the BI tool was provided in early March.  Provided IR team with Cognos Report Studio training in January.

FY08 Activities: Standardization:  The BI team is making a collaborative effort to meet and consult with various existing reporting teams that are currently developing BI solutions.  The goal is to derive a standard data architecture to be used by all disparate data marts in the University, enable best practices, standardize on tools and processes, and encourage sharing of ideas and knowledge within teams.

FY08 Activities Technical Infrastructure:  Planning for scalability, redundancy and performance.  Maintain and administer multiple server environments that include development, training, test and production.  Provide helpdesk support to BI teams and users.  Support migration/deployment

Plans for FY09  Continue to evolve as a Competency Center for BI  Champion standardization and co-ordinate integration efforts  Act as a central resource for BI deployments in University.  Train advanced users to be self sufficient report developers.  Institutionalize lessons learned and advocate best practices  Provide project startup assistance and consultation  Encourage and support use of advanced capabilities of tools

The Business Model  Successful BI implementation is a collaborative effort.  The model is to support small BI teams within schools and units adhering to a centralized architecture and best practices.  Future projects could include deploying BI tool to address reporting needs for various schools and units, such as SES, WCAS, McCormick, and others. The priority of future projects have not been determined yet.  The expectation is that the centralized effort is supported by additional resources and time commitments by individual schools and units.