Skip to main content

BI advice from Southampton Solent University

We were fortunate to have a visit from Neil Randall of Southampton Solent University last month.  Neil and his colleague Paul Colbran gave an excellent presentation at this year’s UCISA conference about their experience of setting up an effective BI service.  I invited Neil to visit Edinburgh to explain their approach to our team and to review our proposed BI architecture.

We began the day with Neil reprising his part of the UCISA presentation and discussing several points arising.  We presented our draft architecture, and then we discussed topics including how to structure and manage a BI service, which ETL tools to use, how best to model data, and how to integrate a data warehouse with relationship management (CRM) software. 

We had a very information conversation about “Extract, Transform, Load” (ETL) tools, which load data from source systems into a data warehouse.  Neil recommended we look at file-based tools rather than database-oriented tools.  Without this advice, we probably would have made the opposite decision, just because we are used to working with database systems.  We will now pilot a file-based tool as part of our initial project, before using this experience to inform our tender for a full procurement.

Among all the topics we discussed, sometimes a really small idea stood out as simple and useful.  One such was that Southampton Solent’s team has a logo that they put on reports derived from the data warehouse, to show that these reports are based on trusted data.  Analysts can use the reporting tools on other data as well, but those reports don’t get the logo, so people reading the reports know they may be more speculative.

We all found Neil’s visit interesting and useful, and we are grateful to him for taking the time to visit Edinburgh.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Project Leadership

When I look back over recent projects that I've been involved in, it seems that one key to making a project successful is having someone on the team who really drives it forward: someone who is invested in the project as a whole and not just their own part in it. We (by which I mean the University's Applications division) have a well-defined project process, with defined roles, required milestones, deployment standards, and so forth.    All these are useful, but if the team doesn't have a leader, it seems a project can lose its way, perhaps not responding to changing circumstances, getting stuck on a technical problem, or not securing a needed resource in time to meet some external constraint. The leader can be any member of the team - it could be a developer, a project manager, or the sponsor, or someone in another role.  A team can include several people who are this committed to the project; it doesn't have to be a single person.   As an example, one of...
Post a Comment
Read more

Business Model Canvas

A Business Model Canvas is a tool for mapping the core functions and capabilities of an organisation.  Compared to the Core Diagrams that I described in an earlier post , the business model canvas attempts to present more aspects of the business, starting with the value proposition – a statement of what the organisation offers to its users (in the business world, to its customers).  It shows the activities and resources, as Core Diagrams do, but also shows user relationships & channels, and also benefits and costs.  I’m not aware of any universities that have used this tool but you can find examples from elsewhere on the web. We are considering business model canvases as a tool for mapping the strategic capabilities of units at the University of Edinburgh.  Phil Taylor, our EA contractor, sketched an outline of what a business model canvas might begin to look like for HR: This is only intended to be suggestive: the real canvas would need to result from in-de...
2 comments
Read more

"That's not Grid!" - A cautionary tale

I don't usually attempt humour here, but see if you like this... Once upon a time, in the far-off world of Computerland, a great guru arose and declared a vision. "I see a future when all computers will be linked together and people will run their programs without knowing which computers are running them. People do not need to know where their jobs run; they just need the results. I call this Grid Computing!" The people of Computerland were excited by the guru's vision. They went away and worked to make it happen. When they were ready, they returned to the guru and said: "Oh great guru! We have implemented your vision. We can run our programs on whichever processor is free at the time, making sure that all programs can run and making best use of all our processors. No longer does one computer sit idle while another one is overloaded. Your vision is a great success!" "No, no, no!", said the guru, "That's not Grid!" The guru exp...
3 comments
Read more