New trends in data warehousing
by Andrea Matulick
UniSA
recently hosted the first meeting of the Data Warehousing and Business
Intelligence Special Interest Group of the Australasian Association of
Institutional Research (AAIR).
AAIR members Graeme Poole (Student and Academic Services) and Andrea Matulick (Planning and Assurance Services) coordinated the two-day event at City West campus, which included speakers from five Australian universities and major software vendors COGNOS and Microsoft. The event was attended by representatives from 18 Australian and two New Zealand universities.
A data warehouse acts as a centralised repository of an organisation’s data and is used to support forecasting and decision-making processes across the enterprise. Many organisations are data rich and information poor, a problem that can be addressed by designing and developing an information management system based on a data warehouse.
More Australian universities are choosing to develop state of the art data warehouses using best practice methods already in use in Australian private industry and the United States. The presentations at the meeting included case studies and demonstrations of architecture, design, performance, software selection and reporting from five Australian universities already involved in data warehousing.
Ken Diefenbach (Central Queensland University) spoke about the huge benefits to corporate reporting, fast analysis and decision making that a carefully planned Data Warehouse can produce. Wayne McCullough (Queensland University of Technology) explained the ability of a warehouse to track changes in data to enable accurate "point of time", "same time last year" and time series reporting.
A survey carried out by the Special Interest Group earlier this year indicated that while private industry warehousing projects typically had budgets of millions of dollars and teams of 25 to 50 people, Australian universities tended to take a longer term approach with budgets of up to $500,000 per year and teams of four to six people.
UniSA is currently engaged in an Enterprise Data Warehouse project to integrate, standardise and document data from its major source systems (student, finance, human resources and research master) plus national benchmarking data and other external data sources. The business and technical managers of the project are Tara Hemingway (Planning and Assurance Services) and Tony Dalwood (Information Strategy and Technology Services).