With an increasing emphasis on leveraging data to make decisions, the Data and Integrations Team within IST needed to identify and launch a toolset that would support the needs that we heard across campus, namely:
- Make it easy for people to work with data to do analysis and build reports
- Provide one place that stores all institutional data so that data stewards can make it available
- Reduce risk to university data by reducing the amount of copies
- Provide and environment that could also support more advanced data analysis
Microsoft Azure
After an extensive review of options, we identified the data tools in the Microsoft cloud as a good fit for our needs. Azure data lake provides a foundation to store data and Azure Data Bricks and Data Factory provide tools to manipulate, migrate, and do deep analysis of data while Power BI provides a user-friendly tool to build reports and dashboards. Six months ago, the Data and Integration Team within IST began quickly learned the tools and began working with campus. We are grateful for a lot of early support from Co-operative and Experiential Education (CEE), Finance, Human Resources, Registrar's Office, Graduate Studies and Postdoctoral Affairs, Student Success Office, Institutional Analysis & Planning, and Advancement to move data into the data lake and start using the reporting tools. Already we have significant momentum with 60 report authors, over 300 data sets, and more than 3TB of data in the lake.
Increased training and expansion of service
Over the next six months we will begin to offer more training to campus on how to user Power BI for reporting while continuing to work with data stewards to move data into the lake and support needs. If you are interested in specific data from a business area, please continue to work with the data stewards as you normally would and we will be there to support them, if needed.
If you are interested in the general capability and how you can reduce manual reporting and data manipulation please contact John Kemp or Daryl Dore -- we are always happy to help.
