Enterprise Data & Analytics and Enterprise Data Warehouse news item
The benefits of using Knowledge Navigator (KN), the graphical metadata repository created in response to changes to data definitions driven by the HR/P Modernization program, are explained by Pieter Visser in a new blog post. The article appears on the website of the Neo Technology company, maker of the Neo4j database adopted for use by UW-IT for KN.
Ever wonder how the University of Washington measures up against other similar schools? Using the eleven Peer dashboards on the UW Profiles website, you can now see for yourself. Four dashboards focus on student measures (graduation, retention, enrollment, and awards) and seven dashboards focus on finance data (expenses, revenue and endowment). Among the newest dashboards, Expenses Story leads the reader through a step-by-step analysis that compares shares of expenditures between research and instruction, while Revenue Total Breakdown compares per FTE tuition revenue with other revenue sources.
Data for these dashboards come from the federal Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) Data Center, a publicly-available repository of self-reported institutional data for US colleges and universities. These dashboards, built in partnership by the Office of Planning & Budgeting’s Institutional Analysis team and UW-IT’s Enterprise Information, Integration & Analytics unit, are the latest additions to the growing suite of UW Profiles interactive dashboards.
Explore all peer comparison dashboards in the UW Profiles Portal. Insights are just a few clicks away.
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Graduation Rates The Graduation Rate dashboard displays 4-, 5-, and 6-year graduation rates for institutions that are part of one of the University of Washington’s peer groups. |
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Retention Rates The Retention Rate dashboard displays one-year retention rates for institutions that are part of one of the University of Washington’s peer groups. |
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Fall Enrollment The Fall Enrollment dashboard displays total student enrollment, as of the official fall reporting date, at institutions that are part of one of the University of Washington’s peer groups. |
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Awards Granted and Completers The Awards Granted dashboard displays the total number of degrees or certificates granted in the latest available academic year by institutions that are part of one of the University of Washington’s peer groups. The Completers dashboard displays the total number of students earning degrees or certificates in the latest available academic year at institutions that are part of one of the University of Washington’s peer groups. |
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Expenses Story The Expenses Story dashboards explore multiple ways to visualize and compare expense data. |
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Expenses by Category The Expenses by Category dashboard displays expenses per student full-time equivalent (FTE). |
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Modified Expenses by Category The Modified Expenses by Category dashboard displays expenses per student full-time equivalent (FTE). |
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Revenue by Category The Revenue by Category dashboard displays revenue per student full-time equivalent (FTE). |
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Revenue Total Breakdown The Revenue Total Breakdown dashboard displays total tuition revenue and state and local appropriations per student full-time equivalent (FTE). |
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Revenue Percent Breakdown The Revenue Percent Breakdown dashboard displays the relative contribution of tuition revenue and state and local appropriations as sources of institutional revenue. |
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Endowment Values The Endowment Values dashboard displays the total values of institutions’ endowments at the beginning and at the end of the most recent fiscal year. |
Did you know the University of Washington ranks 1st in Biochemistry degrees conferred among the top 25 US News and World Reports-ranked public universities? That’s just one of many facts you can discover using new dashboards in UW Profiles. Four new Peer Dashboards show how UW compares with national cohorts, all US public and private institutions, Research 1 institutions, and more. In addition to degree information, you can also compare UW’s graduation, retention and enrollment rates with institutions across the country.
Carol Diem, Director of Institutional Research, shared, “Most universities employ peer comparisons to understand size and scope and performance relative to peer institutions. These dashboards allow the user to do just that.”
The Peer Dashboards are the latest addition to the suite of interactive dashboards available at the award-winning UW Profiles Portal. This joint effort between the Office of Planning & Budgeting and Enterprise Data & Analytics represents the fourth major release of UW Profiles.
This release also introduces new functionality—the ability to apply global unit (campus, college, department) and academic quarter filter selections across all academic dashboards. The dashboards will render faster and display the data you want to see, by default. Learn more in the Global Filters section of the User Guide.
See the UW Profiles help page for more information and please feel free to send any questions to uwprofiles@uw.edu.
A new subscription to the Education Advisory Board (EAB) IT Forum is offering higher education-specific information technology resources to UW students, faculty and staff. For no individual charge, users with a UW NetID can access the service for white papers, webinars, peer articles and other research resources, as well as for in-person consultation, in topic areas such as data governance, measures and metrics, analytics, and student success.
“EAB is an excellent resource, with a long history of specializing in IT for higher education,” said Anja Canfield-Budde, Director of Enterprise Data & Analytics (EDA). “With their deep expertise, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel to solve institutional IT challenges. I wholeheartedly recommend their resources.”
The EAB is made up of 650-plus researchers, consultants and technologists, serving over 1,000 colleges and universities across North America. Earlier this year, UW-IT data leaders provided input to EAB on the paper, A Common Currency: Achieving Excellence in Data Governance and Adoption of Analytics. Read the paper (PDF) on the UW-IT intranet.
“As we continue to grow our ‘data culture’ at the University, we can rely on EAB for expert advice and collaboration opportunities,” said Canfield-Budde.
Learn more:
Activate your user account:
Negotiations on rates for Tableau Desktop licenses and monthly maintenance fees recently concluded and we are pleased to share the total cost of ownership has gone down. The new rates are:
For those who already own a Tableau Desktop license (which includes upgrades), the only impact to your department’s budget is lower monthly maintenance fees.
For those considering purchasing a license, note that the cost to purchase a new Tableau Desktop license has gone up. However, because the monthly maintenance fee has gone down, the purchase cost difference is recouped in 2 years and the overall cost of ownership is lower because of the maintenance fee reduction.
The new rates took effect July 1, 2015. Learn more about UW’s Tableau licensing and Tableau User Group.
Contact tableau@uw.edu with questions.
The UW Profiles Portal, the single access point to a set of Web-based dashboards featuring core UW data, has received the business intelligence industry’s most prestigious honor—The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) Best Practices Award. The international award recognizes excellence and innovation in developing business intelligence, data warehousing and related data management applications. UW Profiles Portal provides a dynamic way to access, explore and understand core UW data through 21 summary and comparison visual dashboards, as well as a searchable catalog and robust documentation.
Campus Technology Innovators also bestowed honors on the UW Profiles Portal and Dashboards, citing “the University of Washington developed an intuitive, user-friendly portal that provides a single point of access to data and visualizations for faculty and staff.”
Two new dashboards make it as simple as clicking a mouse to explore information on UW research awards and proposals at an overall summary or individual unit level and answer questions like:
Many more questions can now easily be answered by using the Research Awards and Research Proposals data dashboards, which are the latest additions to the suite of UW Profiles dashboards, produced in partnership with the Office of Research Information Systems (ORIS) and UW-IT’s Enterprise Data & Analytics (EDA) team.
With these data dashboards, there are now three types of research data exploration tools available to the UW community. Each of the three tools serve specific purposes and audiences:
These tools are available to faculty and staff, through access to the Enterprise Data Warehouse. The EDA team also offers a two-hour, hands-on Handling Data 101 class to help people get started using reports and cubes, using the research cube and reports as example data.
Please send questions to help@uw.edu.
The Research Administration Data (RAD) cube was recently updated to reflect changes in the SAGE database, and to support the upcoming release of research awards and proposals dashboards. The following is a list of those changes.
Key Benefit
Historically, Awards and Proposals have had different, but related Funding Purpose fields (also known as Type of Award). These fields were used to determine Facility & Administrative (F&A) rates, as well as in reporting to the Federal Government. To streamline the Research Administration process, these two different fields were revised in unison, and have been harmonized, such that the values available in both are identical. This new field is now known as the ‘Sponsored Program Activity Type’, and it will be replacing the deprecated Funding Purpose fields in the RAD Cube. A comprehensive back-fill mapping has been developed, in partnership with Office of Sponsored Programs and Grand and Contract Accounting, so this new field will contain values for old Proposals and Awards, based on all available information from those eGC1s and FAs and the relationships between the two.
On July 1, the University of Washington entered the 2015 biennium. With this came updates Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) data, and BI Portal reports and cubes.
In the data, references to ‘CurrentBiennium’ will now draw from the 2015 biennium data. Likewise in reports, you will now see 2015 as a biennium selection option.
The Financial Activity 2015 Biennium was released this week. The EDW now supports financial cubes for 5 biennia, going back to 2007. The 2013 Biennium cube will continue to refresh until August 10, 2015, then will be frozen.
Visit the Business Intelligence Portal to learn more about these and other available cubes. And check out our Handling Data 101 workshop to learn how easy it is to get started slicing, dicing, and charting your data to build comparisons and spot trends. All University faculty and staff are welcome to participate – visit our Workshops page to learn more. If you want to get started now, visit the Analyze Data Using Cubes page.
UW Profiles data visualizations (http://uwprofiles.uw.edu) have greatly enhanced how the University can use data to understand key metrics about students. We are pleased to announce that the data used to create these dashboards is now available for download.
Anyone with Tableau software and access to student data in the Enterprise Data Warehouse can download these data files to craft customized visualizations meaningful to their constituents, using the same UW Profiles data. Detailed definitions and source information are available for each of the four data models (Degrees, Graduation/Retention, Student Credit Hours, and Student). Visit the Data Models tab (https://uwprofiles.uw.edu/#tab2) in the Portal to get started.
This joint effort between the Office of Planning & Budgeting and Enterprise Data & Analytics represents the 3rd major release of UW Profiles. In the pipeline are dashboards using research administration data, expected to release later this summer.
See the UW Profiles help page for more information and please send questions to uwprofiles@uw.edu.
Handy reference links:
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