University liberates users with business intelligence

Roehampton University is using business intelligence tools to enable end users to independently and quickly analyse data.

Before the switchover to the new BI software, the university was constrained in the type of reports it could create from various databases holding student records, timetable information, financial data, course curricula and student recruitment targets for the different academic programmes.

The previous reporting system, Business Objects' Crystal Reports, only linked the data in the performance target system with actual student figures.

Marina Lim, SIS project manager at Roehampton, said the old system required "complex" queries and ran just once a week.

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The university hoped to empower workers with the new system. Lim explained: "The proposed benefit was that the users would be more self-reliant, rather than relying on a central development team, and they would also have access to live information."

The university used the e.Report report design tool, and e.Spreadsheet Excel reporting tool from Actuate to create a new reporting system. The university invested in five days of training and five days of consultancy to get the team analysing the data up to speed.

The new system has paid off in several ways. Being able to run their own reports gives users more flexibility and the reports are more user-friendly. The BI tools also save time should a report need to be changed.

Using the Information Objects feature of e.Report, which collects data from back-end sources and transforms them into a logical map for selection and inclusion in a report, one user ran a report on how many students had signed up for a particular programme.

However, the user forgot to include a field that would tell her whether each student was a combined or single honours student. She went back and reran the report in five minutes.

Lim said: "Before they'd have to make the request to our central MIS [management information systems] team and it could be days before they get the report or find some friendly person to do it quickly for them."

There's scope for further improvement too. The university hopes to use e.Spreadsheet to let users write data (such as student marks) back into the system directly and Lim would like to introduce a portal system that can be accessed remotely - by lecturers working from home, for example.