Luna RajbhandariManager, Business Intelligence
Solutions847 491 7701
Business Intelligence Solutions
Summary In November of 2007, the Business
Intelligence team was officially formed with the hiring of the BI Manager and development of an overall team structure.
The BI Manager and the Lead Architect met with various potential and current BI customers to assess current needs and expectations from the BI tool in the University.
Planning was initiated for the BI team to position itself as the BI Competency Center within the University with centralized product management.
FY08 Activities Discovery Phase for BI Ongoing support: Project Café, HRIS (Position
Management), IR (Faculty reports for Provost’s office)
Initiate BI pilot for CCM in Office for Research Initiate BI pilot for Feinberg Technical Infrastructure planning and
implementations Security implementations Create NUBI user group and engage
community of BI users
FY08 Activities:
Training: BI team is partnering with Future State LLC to
provide Cognos training to community. First round of on-site training for 12 individuals from
Feinberg, OFR, HRIS and IR on the BI tool was provided in early March.
Provided IR team with Cognos Report Studio training in January.
FY08 Activities:Standardization: The BI team is making a collaborative effort to
meet and consult with various existing reporting teams that are currently developing BI solutions. The goal is to derive a standard data architecture
to be used by all disparate data marts in the University, enable best practices, standardize on tools and processes, and encourage sharing of ideas and knowledge within teams.
FY08 ActivitiesTechnical Infrastructure: Planning for scalability, redundancy and
performance. Maintain and administer multiple server
environments that include development, training, test and production.
Provide helpdesk support to BI teams and users.
Support migration/deployment
Plans for FY09 Continue to evolve as a Competency Center for
BI Champion standardization and co-ordinate
integration efforts Act as a central resource for BI deployments in
University. Train advanced users to be self sufficient report
developers. Institutionalize lessons learned and advocate best
practices Provide project startup assistance and consultation Encourage and support use of advanced capabilities
of tools
The Business Model Successful BI implementation is a
collaborative effort. The model is to support small BI teams within
schools and units adhering to a centralized architecture and best practices.
Future projects could include deploying BI tool to address reporting needs for various schools and units , such as SES, WCAS, McCormick, and others. The priority of future projects have not been determined yet.
The expectation is that the centralized effort is supported by additional resources and time commitments by individual schools and units.