Business intelligence to bring improved data organization
IT Systems is currently in the planning stages for ramping up Lee’s business intelligence capabilities.
“By [improving business intelligence], you give the users a lot more control of what they see and how they see it,” said Jesse Houle, a programmer analyst and the lead on this project.
Business intelligence involves an organization using software tools to aggregate and sort tremendous amounts of data and analyzing it to help make smarter business decisions.
Right now IT Systems does that in the form of reports for the different sectors of the university. Once IT Systems finishes with the project, though, users will be able to create complex reports out of massive amounts of information.
Houle said that part of the process of improving BI is developing data warehouses. These will bring together information from various sources and pool them together to make reports easy to create, rather than requiring users to go to multiple sources for that data.
The new BI capabilities will be hosted on Portico when they’re finished, so users can log on and create reports. Users will be able to analyze and sort data on many different levels using PowerPivot, an add-on for Microsoft Excel.
PowerPivot will allow users to examine data in an almost infinite number of ways, filtering results through almost any criteria. This specification of data will help sectors pinpoint areas that need work.
This undertaking is not a small one, though. The organizational structure of the software will require much work to function correctly.
“It’s such a vast, complex setup that we need to make sure that we have those steps planned out very thoughtfully before we move forward,” Houle said.
With that said, IT Systems does not have a projected end date for the project.