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Enterprise Data & Analytics and Enterprise Data Warehouse news item

EIIA team contributes to EDUCAUSE business intelligence guidance

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The Enterprise Information, Integration & Analytics team helped develop content for the EDUCAUSE Review’s “Running a BI Shop” series of four how-to papers on creating business intelligence (BI) programs at higher education institutions. Anja Canfield-Budde, Interim Associate Vice President for Information Management, coauthored the articles along with a fellow BI expert at Purdue University. The articles compare BI planning efforts at Purdue University and the UW, revealing common themes: the value of framing the discussion, obtaining broad stakeholder input, and producing a simple, easily communicated strategy. Aimed at new and seasoned BI professionals, the articles are focused on the following:

  1. Strategic Planning
  2. Building the Organization
  3. Managing the Work
  4. Marketing Your Products

Upgraded Knowledge Navigator makes it even easier to understand UW administrative data

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Now it’s easier than ever to understand UW administrative data, with the latest Knowledge Navigator, the UW’s metadata repository tool. It can help you navigate data changes related to moving from the UW’s old HR/Payroll mainframe system to cloud-based Workday. Use interactive maps to understand the relationships between business concepts and do impact analysis to learn the ramifications of data changes to data tables and columns. Visit the Knowledge Navigator features page to learn more.

Share your data visualizations via the new UW Tableau Public Server

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Now you can share your data visualization dashboards with colleagues anywhere in the world, with the new UW Tableau Public Server. Hosted by UW-IT, the server keeps your data safe and secure; viewers interact with your dashboard but do not download it or the data behind it, and a UW NetID is not required for access. Now it is easy to share UW information, research data and analyses with peer and other institutions as well as the media. Learn more.

New Peer Dashboards Now Available

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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.

  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.
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.
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.
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.
Expenses Story
The Expenses Story dashboards explore multiple ways to visualize and compare expense data.
Expenses by Category
The Expenses by Category dashboard displays expenses per student full-time equivalent (FTE).
Modified Expenses by Category
The Modified Expenses by Category dashboard displays expenses per student full-time equivalent (FTE).
Revenue by Category
The Revenue by Category dashboard displays revenue per student full-time equivalent (FTE).
Revenue Total Breakdown
The Revenue Total Breakdown dashboard displays total tuition revenue and state and local appropriations per student full-time equivalent (FTE).
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.
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.

New UW Profiles Release – Peer Dashboards and Global Filtering

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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.

New higher ed IT resources available to UW community

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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:

  • Account setup uses your UW email address. Get started by going to the EAB website and choosing “Log in now,” then choose “I’m a new user.” Follow the prompts to complete your log-in setup. Once you receive an email from EAB, navigate to “Services,” then “Research & Insights” and then “IT Forum.”

New Tableau License and Maintenance Fees Mean Lower Total Cost of Ownership

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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:

  • New Tableau Desktop license – $1,167 (was $900)
  • Ongoing Tableau monthly maintenance – $33 (includes Tableau support, software upgrades, and online publishing to UW’s Tableau Server; was $44.10)

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.

UW Profiles Portal Honored

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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.”

Explore New Dashboards for UW Research Awards and Proposals

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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:

  • From year to year, what’s the change in proposal dollars for my college?
  • Are industry grants in my department going up over time? How do foreign grants compare to domestic?
  • How many awards did my college receive this year, and how does that compare to five years ago?
  • Who were the top 10 funding entities for my department’s award dollars in Fiscal Year 2015?

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.