New BI Portal is LIVE

June 28, 2022

Team successfully released the new BI Portal v2 on Monday 6/27.

What’s new?

  • New Interface: The BI Portal has a new look but the content is the same, including all the items you had in your “Favorites.”*
  • UW Profiles is now inside the BI Portal: You can navigate to the original dashboards via the Browse by Tags section (shown below) on the home page, then clicking the UW Profiles tile.

BI Portal new interface Browse by Tags for UW Profiles

Where we started
In 2013, the BI (Business Intelligence) Portal made its debut. It was created to provide reports, dashboards and cubes for data available in the EDW (Enterprise Data Warehouse). Reports, dashboards and cubes accessible through the BI Portal offer current and historical institutional data for finance, student and research departments, informing the University’s operations and strategic decision-making.

In 2014, UW Profiles was added to get more data into the hands of more users. This web-based tool displays institutional dashboards created using Tableau software. It was designed to provide University leadership (Provost, Deans, Executives, Directors) with longitudinal information about UW. Each dashboard displays aggregated data for high-level analysis, not detailed information, to be used for operational reporting. 

Bringing it all together
In the spring of 2020, UW-IT Information Management’s Enterprise Reporting and Analytics team started the work of bringing the two separate portals — BI Portal and UW Profiles — together. The main two objectives of consolidating these two portals were improving customer experience and reducing the overall cost of running the infrastructure from two portals down to one.  Some user experience enhancements included: improved search capability, logical grouping of BI products (reports, cubes, dashboard) by tagging, and a more simplistic user interface. The overall redesign of the solution presented additional benefits of streamlining and automating the development processes, including publication of reports to the BI Portal. This improvement eliminates complex manual processes that delayed reports publishing in the past, processes that were prone to human error.

During the past year, the team has finalized the design and development of the new BI Portal. Further refinement of the work came from engaging a small group of users who provided initial feedback around the design and functionality of the portal. During this process, issues were categorized, triaged, and prioritized based on the predefined project criteria, ensuring the product meets the business requirements, use cases, and project timeline. The final User Acceptance Testing (UAT) completed in April of 2022. This UAT group included a much larger group of users who provided additional feedback that was either backlogged or incorporated into this final product. 

What’s next?
The new BI Portal will be the topic of a BI Portal webinar in September. We hope you’ll join the Reporting & Analytics team to take a grand tour of the new interface and get answers to your questions.

Questions?
Please contact help@uw.edu with BI Portal in the subject line.

* Favorites bookmarked during the migration process will not be captured and will need to be bookmarked again.