Data warehouse

As a modern organisation within the increasingly complex, competitive and volatile higher education sector, USQ needs to ensure that it is using its significant data resources to obtain the information that it needs to make informed, timely evidence-based decisions for instance in load planning. Additionally USQ needs to ensure it has the data resources to optimally respond to the ever increasing demands placed on Australian universities to report more and more statistical information to external agencies notably governments and government agencies.

USQ has a range of transactional or operational systems. These support high volumes of repetitive functions and store the associated very large volumes of data (such as staff and student records). These systems are used in the day to day operations of the university and the systems and their data sets are optimally designed for this purpose. As a consequence transactional systems are not well designed for (readily supportive of) the higher level aggregation, extraction, analysis ("slicing and dicing") that is required in the reporting, monitoring, planning and decision making associated with management and strategic planning. For example, from a data point of view, these activities do not need the retention of individual identification details such as names but do need the characteristics of individuals that define the different cohorts such as gender, low socio economic status and ethnicity.

From a functional point of view, trying to carry out these complex reporting tasks directly through the transactional systems can significantly interfere with their transactional processing performance. A further problem is that the operational data required for management and strategy planning is often dispersed – or less desirably duplicated – across transactional systems. A data warehouse is an advanced database system optimally designed to support the type of data structures and the operations associated with reporting and querying for management and strategic planning purposes. The transactional systems provide the source date for the data warehouse usually on a regular update basis. The data warehouse therefore becomes both a condensation and an integration of the operational data into a single source of the necessary data for management and strategic planning purposes. In the other direction, the data warehouse process ensures (mandates) the quality of that data and therefore can lead to (necessitate) improvements in the quality of source system data sets.

The benefits of USQ’s data warehouse include:

• validation of data, giving better data quality
• ability to integrate data from a variety of sources
• improved ability to analyse data beyond the level of standard monitoring reports
• enhanced capacity to both monitor, analyse (slice and dice”), report on and strategize (“what if”) around critical performance indicators such as required for load management and Compact.

The USQ data warehouse cannot be just another system. It will depend on the support of the whole organisation to succeed. It needs to be the system that glues the data and decisions together for the future prosperity of the whole organisation.

If you have any further question regarding business intelligence at USQ, please contact Manager (Strategic Information Systems).