Scope: Institutional Research/Reporting Rollout

Phase 1 - (as characterized by delivering basic functionality at go-live)

A reporting database is necessary in order to minimize production system usage that could cause disruption and delays on the transactional database. Currently, the reporting database consists of a nightly copy of the production database. The reporting database will be used for most reporting activities at go-live.

Externally mandated reporting capabilities will be available Fall 2007 for the following business units:

Admissions, Student Records, Student Financials, and Financial Aid as outlined in the scope document under each specific application.
The Offices of Institutional Research will be provided with the following reporting capabilities:

the ability to report to the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board using the customized menu reporting process currently being used by the University of Houston, Clear Lake.
the ability to report to the National Center for Education Statistics (for IPEDS)and other entities as required using additional census information which will be made available via Structured Query Reporting (SQR) extracts as previously defined by the University of Houston’s Office of Institutional Research.
census data extracted from the production database will be frozen and stored in an Oracle environment.

Reporting limitations include the following:

Accessing data may require work performed by programmers and may not be immediately available to end users.
Only specified census and end-of semester data will be captured and stored for analytical purposes. (Thus only time and date-stamped transactional information that is scheduled, requested, and approved will be available.)
Historical census data retrieved prior to PS go-live will be converted according to Phase II.

Internally required reporting capabilities will be available the Fall semester 2007 as outlined in the scope document under each specific application.
Designated end-users will be able to access both information that currently exists in the operational system as well as specified census (or official reporting date) information via defined processes in a limited capacity at go-live.
Reporting capabilities on information that currently exists in colleges and departments on systems other than ADMIN (e.g. shadow systems) are not part of the initial go-live scope.

Phase 2 – (as characterized by the development of operational data stores concurrently with go-live and into post go-live)

Reporting capabilities will be improved with the implementation of Operational Data Stores (ODSs) that will allow for integration of data sources and improved data availability via a denormalized file structure better accommodating reporting needs.

ODSs will be incrementally created based on business areas (i.e. admissions, student records, etc.) beginning with the Offices of Institutional Research. Because these offices report on student information at census and at the end of the semester, it is expected that this information will also be of value to the Offices of Registration and Academic Records.
Currently existing census and end-of-semester data, gathered prior to go-live, will be converted to the Oracle environment and incorporated in the ODS.

Phase 3 – (as characterized by the refinement of reporting and analytic capabilities beyond go-live and for the long-term)

While data in ODSs will provide detailed information, in order to simplify the reporting process, data will be reshaped (aggregated) to conform to business needs in the form of data marts that support various business areas (e.g. student, human resources, and financials).
Data marts will be linked to create an initial data warehouse.
With the implementation of a data warehouse information will:

be retrieved and stored as regularly scheduled
incorporate multiple sources of information (i.e., student, human resources, and financials, etc.) allowing system-wide reporting. Note these sources may or may not include college and department “shadow systems” depending upon the University of Houston System, institutional, and college/department needs
become better defined in relation to business processes

Advanced analytical tools (e.g., Cognos or Hyperion, etc.) will be made available in order to support analytics such as trending, online analytical processing (OLAP), and online transactional processing (OLTP), as well as dashboards will be made available thereby enhancing knowledge and decision making capabilities throughout the enterprise.
Centralized documentation and end-user access via the web (including links to databases and reporting tools) will be constructed.
Portal capability will be made available.
Ultimately all designated data (whether or not it resides in an ODS or a data mart) will be captured regularly and reside in the data warehouse.