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

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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):

5. 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?

6. 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.” (
“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.” (

7. 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

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

9. Screenshot of Demo

10. 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

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

12. 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

13. Student Implementation Timeline (2013)
FUNCTIONAL
TECHNICAL

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

15. 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)

16. 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)

17. 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!

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

19. Reminder: Complete your session evaluations by April 8th
Contact Information
Lisa Newman Senior Software Engineer Rachael Coombes Business Intelligence Specialist
Reminder: Complete your session evaluations by April 8th