Excerpt from the 2015-2016 OIT Annual Report

Rice University is a highly complex organization. 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.

Excerpt from the 2015-2016 OIT Annual Report

Increasing speed, improving redundancy and security, and preventing disruptions are goals of upgrade

OIT’s Networking Team

The RiceNet3 project is nearing completion and represents Rice’s third significant investment in network and data communications. Primarily, this network refresh consists of higher bandwidth, more support for network-powered devices, and a complete backup power system for the entire network. Additionally, RiceNet3 also provides a framework for the deployment of new and more advanced services such as a more secure network logon, significant improvements in the detection and prevention of security threats, and more effective management and monitoring.

FY 2015 – 2016 was a busy year for all groups in OIT as the Rice Networking and Data Center teams deployed RiceNet3 equipment into every Rice building. Over the past 13 months, over 300 routers, switches, or power systems were replaced or installed with minimal disruption to campus activities and operations. Every access switch on the Rice campus now has redundant, higher speed (10 gb/s) uplinks to the campus network core which interconnects to the Internet via multiple 10 gb/s links to commodity networks and via a 100 gb/s link to the Internet2 research and education network (one of the first installed in Texas). Additionally, every single RiceNet3 network device is supported by an emergency backup power system so it can continue to provide services when power is disrupted to the whole campus or individual buildings for periods less than one hour. This helps improve all campus operations by significantly minimizing the disruption and ensures critical systems such as security devices (access controls and cameras), building automation systems, and monitoring systems remain on-line through power blips.

Additional time has been invested in the development of a new 802.1X-based Identity Services Engine (ISE) system. ISE provides an authentication and policy system for connecting devices to RiceNet3’s wired network in a more secure and flexible manner. The Rice Networking team, in conjunction with the IT Security team, systems administrators, Campus Services team members, and members of the campus community have developed and tested ISE. All of the residential college buildings are already using ISE successfully on a daily basis.

Wireless enhancements have been implemented in a number of campus buildings. Rice’s network team has been performing wireless surveys, working with the campus community to identify and understand their needs in order to improve everyone’s experience through better placement of existing access points (APs) as well as installation of additional units. Throughout the last year, significant improvements have been made across campus and in residential apartments by adding 250 APs, raising the total number of campus APs to 1,836.

Excerpt from the 2015-2016 OIT Annual Report

A campus collaboration with the Office of the Registrar to ensure undergraduates are on track for their degree goal

The Student Information Systems team in OIT has been working closely with the staff from the Office of the Registrar on a new system for certifying degree candidates, providing information to advisors, and enabling a student to track and monitor their progress toward the degree they seek. The Office of the Registrar worked with the departments across campus to gather and verify the degree requirements for all of Rice’s undergraduate degrees. Once coded, verified, and approved the degree requirements were migrated to the production DegreeWorks system. On the technical side software was developed to move the Scribe rules from the test system to the production system to remove the work of rekeying the rules in the production environment and also eliminating keystroke errors. The Student Information Systems team developed the integration between DegreeWorks, Banner, and Esther. Both groups were involved in software development and extensive testing. The integration involved loading and refreshing the student information from Banner to DegreeWorks as well as the mapping of students to their advisors.

“Currently, a student can disappear (not see an academic advisor) for a couple of years then reappear only when it is time to audit the degree. By then it is often too late to fix things. I hope to address this problem by periodically downloading the entire list of majors and minors with my department, then use Degree Works to review their progress. Thank goodness for Degree Works. Adopting the system was a great idea. My plan is to conduct reviews at least once a year and spot students who are behind or perhaps are at risk due to low grades.”

David Caprette
Professor in the Practice, BioSciences

Total numbers of academic programs, degrees and course sections supported in the student system this past academic year (2015-2016).

Excerpt from the 2015-2016 OIT Annual Report

OIT’s Web Technology team and Public Affair’s Web Development and Design team partnered in the spring of 2015 to launch a new model for creating Rice websites. The strategy leverages the use of a leading commercial cloud hosting service by Acquia Corporation using the Drupal content managing system. The model uses a set of templates that greatly simplify the creation of sites. The templates are predefined but allow for flexibility in arranging content. They also comply with Rice brand standards.

The Public Affairs team provides the design themes and creates the templates, the OIT team provides engineering support, Drupal expertise, and template training. They also develop software modules and integration with other Rice systems for automated content such as course feeds. Once the shell of the site is completed, including navigation and integration points, the site owner provides the content. Minimal technical skills in web development are required in order to add and maintain content. There is no charge to the Rice department for the creation of a template-based site or ongoing hosting costs within the framework.

The first sites that tested the new process were new sites created to support Rice’s strategic research initiatives including the Rice Academy of Fellows (http://www.riceacademy.rice.edu/) and the Creative Ventures (https://creativeventures.rice.edu/) websites. The team’s skills and workflow were successfully put to the test when the sites needed to go live in a few weeks in order to maximize the timeframe in which applications could be accepted for the program.

Weekly Drupal training sessions are held for the campus web community to become familiar with the templates techniques for adding and maintaining content. Other activities include co-sponsoring a monthly web forum for campus administrators with an interest in or responsibility for web sites.