Oracle(R) Business Intelligence and Data Warehouse Provides Foundation for
Personalized Data Dashboards
REDWOOD SHORES, Calif., April 2, 2008
-- Oracle(R) today announced that Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is
using Oracle Business Intelligence solutions to help users define,
analyze and interpret data stored in its Oracle data warehouse.
Rensselaer has significantly increased the accuracy and reliability of
data and has created dashboards that deliver secure, personalized data
to more than 650 users -- facilitating improved planning, forecasting
and decision-making.
-- A major research institution with campuses in Troy, N.Y. and Hartford,
Conn., Rensselaer needed to provide its faculty and staff with timely,
accurate data for university operations. However, the institution's
previous paper-based system produced inaccuracies in data and often
resulted in duplicative efforts and significant delays. Further,
various departments could not agree on basic definitions, such as what
was considered a full-time student, leading to inaccuracies when
comparing data between departments.
-- Rensselaer built a data warehouse on Oracle Database, cleansing and
unifying data across the institution and storing it in one secure
location. By centralizing its data in one data warehouse, the
university improved its data quality, ensuring consistency and
availability of information.
-- Over time, Rensselaer developed business intelligence dashboards in a
number of critical areas to provide users with real-time, role-based
access to data from the 130 GB data warehouse that helps them better
perform their duties.
-- Rensselaer's dashboards provide users with data on current and past
years, enabling them to view high-level information and drill down
into specific data points. Dashboards include:
-- Admissions - Provides information on applicant demographics and
statistics, enabling users to analyze trends such as admissions
quality and selectivity, student retention rates and inquiry-to-
application rates
-- Student registration - Provides information on enrollment,
courses and grades, allowing the university to examine classroom
capacities and teaching loads
-- Financial aid - Monitors student financial aid, indicating type,
duration, source and amount of assistance for each student and
providing university-wide figures
-- Financials - Compares actual performance to budgets, providing
users from all departments with daily insight into remaining
budget. Also displays a detailed breakdown of labor expenses,
especially helpful for work performed against research grants
where the project lead needs to track administrative versus
teaching labor expenses
-- Human resources - Displays data about faculty and staff, helping
the university track trends such as diversity, turnover rates and
workforce aging
-- Research - Presents data on research income, expenditures, yields
and cost sharing by sponsoring agencies, disciplines, schools and
departments
-- Advancement - Provides staff with insight into which alumni are
donating and how much, as well as tracking specific campaign
totals
-- Compliance - Monitors compliance against internal processes and
identifies instances where an administrator needs to correct
errors before distributing suspicious data
-- With the dashboards in place, Rensselaer is taking the next step to
improve performance management, by analyzing the institution's data
versus internal and external benchmarks and key performance indicators
(KPIs). This benchmarking is helping the institution improve
decision-making and forecasting. For example, the admissions
department can quickly create a report that compares Rensselaer's
diversity statistics with peer institutions' data or displays the rate
of inquiry-to-application over the last five years. Because users
spend less time gathering data, they can spend more time analyzing it
-- and putting it to use -- to create new ways to more effectively
attract the most qualified applicants and turn inquiries into
applications.
-- Rensselaer selected Oracle for its data warehouse and business
intelligence project through an in-depth process involving 20 staff
members from various university departments. The group chose Oracle
because of the breadth of its offering, encompassing a reliable data
warehouse platform and advanced intuitive business intelligence
applications, as well as the natural flow between the technologies.
Supporting Quotes
-- "Rensselaer has demonstrated how the value of an institution's data
increases when users are able to leverage the information to measure
their performance and identify areas to focus on and improve.
Oracle's data warehouse and business intelligence tools help higher
education institutions like Rensselaer gain the necessary insight for
making informed, strategic decisions," said Robert Santimauro, group
vice president, Oracle Higher Education.
-- "Our data warehouse and business intelligence project is unique
because of its scope. Our entire culture is evolving from crunching
numbers to measuring performance and asking 'what does this data mean
to us, now and in the future?' Oracle provides the required breadth
and functionality to support our unique needs and help us leverage
data to improve performance," said Ora Fish, acting director,
Integrated Administrative Computing Services, Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute.
Supporting Resources
http://www.oracle.com/industries/education/highered.html
http://www.oracle.com/solutions/business_intelligence/index.html
http://www.oracle.com/database/index.html
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