Increased deployment of the business intelligence tools

• Within a scalable, sustainable infrastructure, increased deployment of a user-friendly, web based query and reporting tool (fully integrated with Microsoft Office Products) along with canned reports (monthly financials, budget templates). The business value includes an authoritative and secure environment for data management with reporting (and tools) delivered through a decision support portal (one-stop information shopping). This will provide a foundation upon which to better synchronize our planning. The need for maintaining ‘shadow systems’ will be greatly minimized.

Expansion of the data warehouse to include:

• Expansion of the enterprise wide Data Warehouse to include historical, high quality institutional data presently housed in flat files by the Office of Planning and Analysis. These files contain information used to manually produce reports such as the Data Manual and Registrar’s Report. This data also has the potential to be used to provide reporting for Undergraduate Program Reviews. Timely, electronic and enterprise wide access to this information in user friendly, drill down reporting formats will greatly enhance decision making information availability. This will automate the currently manual and labour intensive processes used to gather the information for, calculate and report key performance indicators.
• Development of a financial data mart (to include all ‘funds’, e.g. Operating, Capital, Ancillary) along with appropriate data quality standards, monthly frozen snapshots and implementation of university-wide financial reporting standards. This will facilitate electronic access to integrated financial information necessary for the development and maintenance of an integrated, multi-year financial planning framework. Canned reports to include monthly web based financial statements for all funds, with drill-down capability along with budget templates automatically populated with data.

Data Quality Initiatives

• Enhanced internal and external financial reporting through implementation of data quality and university wide reporting standards. Using the BI software, improve external compliance and performance reports (accuracy, timeliness). Automate the COFO-UO return to reduce the manual and labour intensive process currently used to prepare this report.

Strategic Performance Management Software

• Implementation of Strategic Performance Management Software to support the performance measurement and monitoring initiative that is a fundamental component of the Refining Directions implementation process. This tool will assist implementation teams and various management units of the University in critically assessing and identifying meaningful and statistically relevant measures and indicators. This software can perform causal analyses among various measures within and across areas providing useful information on inter-relationships between factors and measures. As well as demonstrating how decisions in one area affect other areas, these cause-and-effect analyses can reveal both good performance drivers and also possible detractors and enable ‘evidenced-based’ decision-making. Finally, the tool provides a balanced scorecard reporting format, designed to identify statistically significant trends and results that can be tailored to the specific goals, objectives and measures of the various operational areas of the University.

Key Performance Indicators

• Reduction of paper reports
• Reduction of duplicate key entry and maintenance of shadow systems
• Performance management (report card) available through the web-based decision support portal
• Improved access to data and consistent data definitions and quality standards will enable the extraction and integration of data into a single nomenclature for reporting (example: Undergraduate Program Reviews).