On March 26 and 27, the Synch-Solutions Data Warehousing (DW) and Business Intelligence (BI) team participated in the INAIR (Indiana Association for Institutional Research) 23rd Annual Conference in Indianapolis. INAIR is composed of faculty and staff at Indiana’s public and private, two- and four-year colleges and universities, and others who are interested in the study of postsecondary education. It provides a platform for the dissemination of information and interchange of ideas on problems of common interest in the field of Institutional Research. INAIR is dedicated to fostering unity and cooperation among Institutional Researchers at Indiana colleges and universities. It is a regional affiliate of the international Association for Institutional Research (AIR). Institutional Research is crucial to institutions of Higher Education for its role in mining and analyzing data.

Institutional Researchers are the key drivers of new analytical strategies for reducing time, effort and redundant work. Some institutions maintain this group as a standalone unit, while others include Institutional Research in the Department of Information Technology. Research staff may be called Institutional Researchers, or may be assigned titles according to the nature of their work, such as Information Analyst or Management Analyst.

Our Vendor Presentation

On the second day of the conference, the Synch-Solutions team presented on “Institutional Performance Visibility Through Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence.” In this presentation, we put forth insights on DW concepts, BI tools, project initiation and the real power of Institutional Intelligence available to those who employ the tools and processes with the proper mindset. Many Institutional Researchers attended Synch’s presentation and participated in the Q&A session. The interactive nature of the presentation enabled Institutional Researchers to share their current challenges and expectations with Synch team. DW concepts and BI tools can give institutions the edge to stay competitive in an increasingly demanding and challenging field.

At the Exhibit Hall

In addition to making the presentation, Synch-Solutions’ DW and BI team also exhibited at the conference expo. We managed an exhibitor booth to share Synch’s profile and service offerings. The highlight at our booth was our Student Administration Dashboard Demo. The Institutional Researchers were intensely interested in understanding the functionality, technology and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that are essential for developing a Digital Dashboard for an institution.

The demo of Synch-Solutions’ Student Administration Dashboard for Higher Education illustrated how, using only 2 significant KPIs, along with more than 15 measures and 9 dimensions with drill-through capability, the dashboard was capable of providing up to 4,000 static reports. The Institutional Researchers liked the multidimensional design and slice-and-dice functionality, and made such comments as, “This is a perfect solutions for improving the efficiency of my department and its capacity to meet the needs of all of our stakeholders.

Institutional Research + Business Intelligence = Institutional Intelligence

Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence can no longer be framed as “long-term goals” for institutions of Higher Education. They are widely embraced technologies that are highly valued for institutions that have implemented them. Such institutions stand as living proof of the effectiveness of DW and BI. 

The Synch team gained valuable experience and knowledge at the INAIR conference, and we are looking forward to attending the Association for Institutional Research (AIR) 49th Annual Forum in Atlanta from May 30 to June 3. We hope to see you there!

No one would argue that much is turbulent in our economy today, and this turbulence certainly extends to educational institutions as well. Yet, even in more stable times, educational institutions are subject to changing enrollment trends and regulatory requirements, regardless of the economic conditions, and their leaders must maintain the institutions’ abilities to perform. In spite of cuts in budgets and resources, colleges and universities must find ways to thrive in the face of the following challenges:
- State colleges are being deluged with record numbers of student applications, while applications for private colleges are declining due to the higher tuition costs at these institutions.
- Community and specialty colleges are showing increases in the numbers of applications, due to lower costs of tuition and a workforce seeking to retool skill sets in preparation for “the next big thing.”
- Business colleges and universities continue to receive student applications from strong international candidates, despite stringent admission and immigration requirements.
- Federal student financial aid reporting requirements are changing in 2009, along with many college board, state and local reporting requirements.

To meet these challenges, educational institutions are faced with a dilemma. They must either (A) continuously modify their current Student Administration systems to address the new requirements, or (B) upgrade their current Student Administration systems to incorporate new requirements.

At the HEUG (Higher Education User Group) Alliance 2009 conference in Anaheim, California, Oracle addressed the educational challenges by stating the following commitments, relative to its PeopleSoft Campus Solutions product:
- Minimize operational disruption and the capital costs that have often been experienced with major upgrades
- Deliver Campus Solutions as a stand-alone instance
- Give customers options for HCM (Human Capital Management) integration

The release of Campus Solutions 9.0 achieves these goals by offering the following for upgrade customers:
- Campus Solutions 9.0 (CS 9.0) will be the base foundation application being supported.
- CS 9.0 will be independent of HCM 9.1 (CS 9.0 remains connected to HCM 9.0).
- Additional changes will be implemented using feature packs. A feature pack is one or more enhancements and/or one or more new features that can be applied directly to the current release, without an upgrade event.
- Campus Solutions products will be migrated to service-enabled technology over time.
- CS 9.0 includes enhancements and features that were originally targeted for CS 9.1.
- HCM 9.1 and CRM 9.1 integration are included.
- Service-enabled core product modules (Admissions, Enrollment, etc.) are included.

For those who choose the Oracle legacy path (option A), the caveats are as follows:
- If you are on Campus Solutions 8.9 or earlier, support will last only the next few years and will vary by support contract.
- Any future government-mandated changes will require software customizations.
- Maintenance to legacy systems will need to address both new requirements and modifications to old requirements.

The key benefit in the upgrade option is no further upgrade events. Anyone who has gone through an upgrade realizes the resources, expenses and time needed for such an endeavor. Limiting that impact by using service-enabled (e.g, Oracle Fusion or Java-based) modules is clearly a step in the right direction, and minimizes the impact on costs and resources.

We’ve heard it before, change is the only constant. Change comes in waves and in many forms – big, small, congenial and risky – causing you to evaluate your current state and wonder if the decisions you make will bring you to a safe harbor of continuity and growth or into a rocky reef of maintenance-laden, disparate application interfaces.

I had these things in mind when I attended the Oracle Solutions Fair on January 29. As we were headlong into what was projected to be a very long-term recession, the question in both the customer’s and vendor‘s mind was: Why should I spend money or resources on Oracle products?

Mark Stevens, Vice President of Industry Strategy & Insight from Oracle, gave an excellent opening presentation, Building the Business Case for the New Technology Stack, arguing on that very subject. Several well-documented studies have made compelling arguments about the importance of making the right investment decisions during a recession (e.g., cash investments vs. cash hoarding and IT budget cuts vs.other departmental cuts).

Stevens indicated that the longer a recession lasts, the greater the post-recession growth prospects – and companies that invest during the recession are far better positioned to take advantage of that growth…a ray of hope during these dark financial times. Stevens cited Wal-Mart, Abbott Laboratories, Walgreens and Arrow Electronics as companies that are continuing to invest and execute growth strategies as we move deeper into recession, which should serve them very well when we come out on the other side.

Along with Carol Morken, Synch-Solutions’ Director of Marketing, I looked at the following Oracle solutions:
Identity Management – a security manager to control all application security
Business Intelligence – the collected information from a data warehouse that enables informed decision-making
SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) – Web-enabled connections creating a kind of 21st-century EDI (Electronic Data Interchange)
Beehive – a collaborative software similar to the Facebook model

Any organization considering these products must answer to the question: How can these products help our business? In order to answer this question properly, the organization must first answer another question: How do we want to achieve our business goals?

In general, the application of technology as a speculative investment, rather than a strategic investment as part of a unified overall plan, produces the same results as a bad stock pick. Case in point: there are no mass-produced 5-wheeled cars out there, or GPS wedding rings!

But an investment in technology that improves a task, fulfills a goal or rolls up to a mission statement is a wise choice in any economic climate.

In the other two blog entries in this series, I gave hints and tips for the agile Business Analyst up to the stage of documenting business requirements. In this entry, I will address the follow-up to that phase of the project life cycle with a few more tips.

• Once the requirements document is approved and signed-off, assist the team with the next step – System Design and Test Script/Test Case development work.
     • Be prepared to answer questions regarding the requirements.
• Take the role as liaison between the user community and the technical team.
     • The BA is the communication broker between the users and the IT team. As an ambassador of business and functional knowledge, you must be able to convey the business requirements clearly to both the Developers and the Quality Assurance Analyst.
• Participate in Change Management Board Meetings.
     • Document and track all the changes taking place.
• Participate in User Acceptance Testing (UAT).
     • In many cases, BAs don’t get involved in UAT sessions. However, from my experience, BAs must be prepared to play an important role in UAT to address the user testing phase.

Remember, Business Analysts do not merely document business requirements, but they also serve as liaisons and communication brokers between the technical team and the user community. Doing things right from the beginning will reduce the likelihood of making wrong steps during project development.

I wish luck to all the Business Analysts out there. Thanks for taking the time to read my blog entries.

In my last blog entry, I gave some suggestions of how the agile Business Analyst should lay the groundwork prior to gathering business requirements. In this entry, I will give some tips for the agile BA covering the next couple of main project stages.

• Gathering Business Requirements
     • During your first meeting with business users, gather the High-Level Requirements.
     • Always keep your discussions within scope of the project.
     • If any requirements are out of scope, document them for future enhancements.
     • Diligent users seeking to do their jobs right typically want everything. But remember not all the requirements are critical to business – some could be just ‘nice to have.’ Negotiate with business users and other stakeholders to identify the requirements that will add the most value to the business.
     • If you receive conflicting requirements from different business users, call a meeting to address the gaps. Get the users to justify and prioritize the requirements based on importance and criticality to business.
     • Never offer technical solutions for current issues on the spot, but rather document all issues and take them to your technical team for discussion. Then come up with solutions that can be shared with the business users.
     • Document all the points and send them to the business users after the meeting. This will ensure that the points are correctly conceived, and, if any are wrongly captured, that the business users will have the opportunity to correct them.

• Leading Joint Application Development (JAD) sessions
     • Realize that it will be next to impossible to get developers and other team members, as well as other stakeholders, together all at once to sit in a room and brainstorm about system design.
     • Be willing and able to play the lead role in administering, managing and facilitating JAD sessions.

• Documenting the Business Requirements
     • When you develop the business requirements document, spell out the details clearly, without any ambiguity or vague points. Use simple words to describe the requirements.
     • Present the requirements with diagrams, flow charts or pictures. Remember, “a picture is worth 1,000 words!”
     • For effectiveness, use Use Case or UML diagrams to present the details.
     • Use MS Visio to present the workflow models or business processes clearly.
     • Provide both ‘AS-IS’ and ‘TO-BE’ models, so that business users can compare and understand the differences.

In my next blog entry, I will wrap up this series with some tips for the agile Business Analyst during the stages that follow the documentation of business requirements.

This morning as I sat in front of my laptop to write this blog entry and share my thoughts with fellow bloggers, I remembered the very first time I was hired as a Systems Analyst, about ten years ago. For a minute, I indulged myself in a brief walk down memory lane. As a fresh grad with burning desires to take any challenges thrown my way, I had my share of ups and downs. The struggles to blend my student mindset with corporate professionalism are not easy to describe. However, they made me who I am now: a Senior Business Analyst, having a certain level of expertise in terms of both functional and technical knowledge, but still craving new knowledge and challenges on day-to-day basis.

The objective of this article is to share my working experience through some tips for the agile Business Analyst. Like those in some other IT roles, Business Analysts play a significant role in ensuring a smooth project implementation. If you consider the multiple phases of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) or Project Life Cycle (PLC), the business requirement gathering phase is the very first phase in the project pipeline. A precise and concise set of business requirements are the strength, backbone and foundation of the project implementation activities. Business Analysts are the people who face the firing squad of Business Users, Developers, Quality Assurance Analysts and other project team members, as well as other Stakeholders. They get involved in the early stages of the project, remain with the project as it evolves from one phase to another, work as a liaison between business users and developers, are fully accountable for the accuracy of requirements, produce documentation, and the list goes on.

First up, I will cover the preliminary stage, in which we do all of our groundwork prior to gathering the business requirements, along with some general hints and tips for the agile BA.

• Do your homework 
      • Take time to research the company history, business background and stakeholders.  This knowledge will increase your confidence when addressing the company’s business users or other stakeholders.
• Be prepared 
      • Develop questionnaires related to business processes, business user expectations, etc.
      • Prior to a meeting, send the agenda to business users so that they can be properly prepared.
• Be creative
      • Open yourself up to unconventional solutions.
• Communicate well
      • You are an ambassador representing the IT group. You must be able to communicate well not only with your teammates but also with business users, managers and everyone with a stake in the project.
• Break the rules 
      • Don’t take this to mean that you should literally break any of the company rules or policies. What I’m trying to say is that you should break the traditional way of capturing business requirements by incorporating new techniques, tools and methodologies in your requirement-gathering activities.
      • Explore options to present requirements in a strategic way that others will understand.
• Control the interview sessions
      • Always stick to your agenda and questionnaire topics.

In my next entry, I will continue through the project stages of gathering and documenting business requirements.

Most of us have heard Oracle speak of the need to develop a roadmap for our PeopleSoft products. Oracle recommends laying out a timeline or schedule that guides the transition from a PeopleTools-based product to a Fusion-based product. While I’m sure most agree this is a beneficial activity for budgeting and planning purposes, it can prove to be difficult, given that there are no guarantees with the “what, when, where and how” of the future Fusion product suite.

This past September, Oracle presented useful PeopleSoft subject matter at the OpenWorld 2008 conference in San Francisco. Much of this information could impact, or result in further refinement to, existing roadmap documents. The focus of my next few blog entries is to highlight some of the topics relevant to PeopleSoft strategic planning activities.

At the top of my list is PeopleTools 8.50, an update that could impact your 2009 IT plans. With the hype (and some confusion) surrounding the future Fusion product, it was refreshing to see a live demonstration of an enhanced PeopleTools product that brings the user interface more in line with today’s Web 2.0 standards. Oracle expects this release sometime in 2009, and given the fairly extensive demo at OpenWorld, the GA estimate appears accurate. I would recommend reviewing the presentation (and bookmarking the Oracle PeopleTools blog if you haven’t already) to better understand some of the updated capabilities with Tools 8.50.

Some features outlined in the presentation to keep in mind:

• Backward compatible: The 8.5 Tools release is backward compatible to any application running at least 8.4x. If you’re running Financials 8.9 on Tools 8.47 you can upgrade directly to 8.5. Some shops may see a better ROI by upgrading the Tools and leaving the application at the current level.

• Enriched navigation enhancements available with just the Tools upgrade:
    • Partial Page Refresh
    • Modal Lookup Prompts & Error Messages
    • New Menu, Favorites, Recent Visits
    • Homepage Pagelet Drag/Drop
    • Independent Pagelet Refresh
    • Type Ahead/Auto-Complete
    • Modal Zoom Grid for existing grids

• Connected Query – allows the developer to join PS Queries into parent-child relationships to further increase the tool’s ability as a reporting source. There will also be additional enhancements with Web services to run PS Query data to XML publisher or a third-party application.

The presentation does include new features that are dependent on additional product licensing. For example, the presentation shows a new feature that can pull business intelligence (BI) content directly into a page, based on the page’s current context. While the feature looks both sharp and useful, it requires a separate BI tool to generate the required data. Additionally, some of the features are dependent on an upgrade to 9.1 (GA estimate 2010). When reviewing these updated capabilities, make sure you differentiate what is delivered with the Tools upgrade by itself, as well as what’s available with the 9.1 application upgrade included. Regardless, the PeopleTools 8.5 release, scheduled for release in 2009, does offer compelling updates that should be analyzed against existing roadmap strategies.

Adrian Sannier, Arizona State’s university technology officer believes, to the depth of his being, that it is.  And he expressed his powerful thought leadership position regarding what the shift is all about and what to do about it in his presentation at Campus Technology’s July 2008 conference.  In one of the most informative and colorful keynote speeches I’ve ever experienced, he laid out six components of the new paradigm that he believes must be elucidated, embraced and executed.  Component #1 is the most controversial but, perhaps, most essential because it enables the other five.  Component #1 “liberates the resources” as Adrian says, to do the rest.

You just have to hear it to appreciate the intensity of his conviction regarding the need for change in how information technology is managed in higher education!  Here is the link to listen to Adrian’s presentation – 73 minutes of transformative and energizing thinking about what the future can hold for institutions that embrace change!  Adrian paints a clear vision of the path that can lead to enhanced learning and educational value through a restructuring of the technology environment – in keeping with a strategy that separates “the core” from “the context.” 

Much more cost effective strategies exist today for maintaining “the context,” – meaning the software applications that have become mere commodities that are essential but not differentiating – than are currently being utilized by the majority of universities.  When they are employed, budgets can be reallocated to take advantage of the host of “core” technologies that facilitate collaboration, informed decision-making for stakeholders, and learning…with the agility to embrace the new and upgraded technologies as they continue to emerge onto the scene.

In this new era of modern technology, Higher Education is in the midst of rapid change in response to environmental, social, economic, technological and political transformations occurring worldwide. As a result, institutions of Higher Education are facing ever more numerous operational challenges. In order to survive these challenges, Higher Education needs new institutional strategies and decision-making processes. For a Higher Education institution to prosper and perform efficiently, all levels of campus staff and administration must collaborate to create a wave of change by implementing Business Intelligence to manage and monitor campus performance. Going one step higher, a digital dashboard provides a view of campus performance that can be directly mapped to campus vision and mission.

So to all Higher Education institutions out there, please take this opportunity to re-strategize your campus performance management in order to gain or maintain a competitive edge!

In my last entry, I discussed the data warehouse’s role in the digital dashboard for Higher Education. In parallel to the data warehousing technology, Business Intelligence (BI) is a system of reports, metrics and dashboards designed to drive decisions that optimize an organization’s performance. Reports, scorecards and digital dashboards are some BI applications that could be designed using data warehousing technology. Business Intelligence components reside on the data warehousing platform to enable end users to access them more efficiently.

BI performance management software for Higher Education enables you to:
• Calculate curriculum costs
• Identify good fundraising programs and sources (e.g., Alumni)
• Monitor student headcount and performance, program outcomes, school reputation, national agendas and other KPIs
• Share secure Web-based information with all stakeholders
• Manage endowments and recruitment through driver-based planning
• Spot high- and low-performance schools or programs
• Map enrollment to attendance and attendance to performance
• Speed compliance reporting

I’ll wrap up with my conclusions regarding the digital dashboard for Higher Education in my next entry.