“We help you find information that you can’t access anywhere else.” With these words, Linda Humphreys launches into an explanation of data analytics that is accessible – meaning friendly, in this case – to everyone at Rice. Humphreys is a Data Systems Manager in the division of Information Technology (IT). “Maybe the information you want to review is in multiple areas of Banner, or is spread out over multiple systems like Banner, an external system, and several individual Excel workbooks. We use dimensional modeling to link the data sources and create a new data system that is accessible and understandable to the end user.”
End users of data analytics usually want information they can use to make recommendations or decisions for their department, or they want to show trends and/or forecasts about their area for a presentation. Development and Alumni Relations, Corporate Relations, the Office of Technology Transfer, the Office of Sponsored Research, the Center for Career Development, the Jones School and their Career Management Center, and external partner Chevron all collaborated to share data for a report used in a December presentation to the Board of Trustees.
Ann McAdam Griffin, Associate Director for Corporate Relations, said, “Companies engage with Rice across a spectrum of activity including recruiting our students, licensing inventions, sponsoring research, sponsoring employees for executive education and MBAs, sponsoring events, joining consortia, etc. Currently, the financial and descriptive data capturing that engagement are maintained in Banner, Millennium, spreadsheets and people’s heads. We worked with Linda Humphreys to gather and load all that data from the disparate sources into Cognos. Cognos allowed us to develop a dashboard to give us a high level picture of a company’s engagement on campus that includes all the financial pieces along with recruiting and engagement status. We also were able to create drill down capabilities to look more closely at where on campus a company is investing its money for a five year period, along with deeper dives in recruiting activity. Using Cognos gave us the ability to seamlessly analyze a company’s activities at Rice, in a way that we didn’t previously have.”
The Cognos report was based on specific point-in-time data. If the collaborators decide to continue tracking the data, phase two of the project would require attaching links to either the original sources or to spreadsheets that are regularly updated with new data. For slow moving real time data (data that changes very little or slowly over time), Cognos can create snapshots of data for historical review and comparison.
With so many fingers in the pie, how can data stewards be confident that no one is corrupting their sensitive information or systems? Real time views of the data in Mozilla’s Firefox or Microsoft Internet Explorer browsers work like one-way mirrors. They reflect out views or images of the data that is housed in secure locations, without providing access to the actual data through the image. Even though the original data is secure and untouched, opening an interactive report full of confidential data still requires a NetID password as well as specific Cognos permissions.
Cognos does much more than return diagrams and charts, even though these graphic representations of data are what most Rice community members visualize when they hear about the system. Sometimes, a department just needs a more understandable way of finding and reviewing data. Susannah Mira, the Faculty Data Steward in the Office of the Vice Provost for Academic Affairs said,”We are using Cognos to collate and present complex faculty appointment information, including historical records, in a way that is easy to display, search, and report on. With Cognos we can pull data from an assortment of Banner tables into a single report, whereas in the past this was only possible through multiple Banner downloads that then had to be consolidated for a complete view of a particular faculty member or group. Finally, we can now save Cognos reports to be run again with fresh data anytime and share them with other offices.”
For more information about using Cognos for data analytics, contact the IT Help Desk at 713.348.4357 or helpdesk@rice.edu.