Rice University logo
 
Top blue bar image OIT News
Office of Information Technology
 

Data Warehouse

 

Excerpt from the 2015-2016 OIT Annual Report

Rice University is a highly complex Data Storage Concept Illustrationorganization. The complexity is reflected in the vast amount of data generated as the university carries out its various activities from teaching and research, conducting its financial and business affairs, to building relationships with its students, faculty, staff, alumni, and many other constituents. This data is contained in various systems and is routinely used to manage the operations of specific functions areas such as tracking a student’s academic progress, sponsored research, employee benefits, procurement, accounting and other financial and administrative functions.

In 2015 OIT in close partnership with a number of offices but primarily the Office for Institutional Research (OIR) restarted a project to build a data warehouse. A highly diverse team of staff with expertise in existing transactional systems, data modeling, data transformation, and visualization was assembled. Initial load into the warehouse focused primarily on student data and a way to visualize that data using new Tableau tools. Besides Tableau other technology that OIT is using to create these integrations and enable end user analytics are Talend for data integration and Oracle databases including in memory processing for storing and processing data warehouse information more quickly.

Though the initial data set is limited, faculty are already finding new and creative ways to use these tools. As an example, Farès El-Dahdah, Director of the Humanities Research Center has used grant information from the data warehouse and blended it using Tableau with information that he has stored in the cloud in an Airtable database to create a personalized financial report to monitor graduate student spending.

Going forward, work continues on a number of use cases across campus including these three:

1. Development and Alumni Relations (DAR) relies heavily on data driven decision-making. Doward Hudlow explained, “DAR is in the business of building relationships and measuring the strength of these relationships through the contributions of time, talent and financial support.”

2. Katie Cervenka, Executive Director of the Office of Corporate and Foundation Relations (OCFR), explained their needs, “The challenge OCFR faces is that there is no way to access complete information about a company’s activity on campus because relevant data (recruiting and internship statistics, philanthropic investments, sponsored research, executive education, alumni statistics, volunteer engagement) reside in a variety of different databases or even in Excel spreadsheets.”

3. William Turner, Assistant Vice Provost for Research, combines financial data about research grants with the space data and human resources data to create dashboard reports on space utilization by grant and principal investigator.

 

Comments are closed.