Registration and Curriculum Data in the Data Warehouse

DRAFT

Project Name:   Registration and Curriculum Data in the Data Warehouse

Project Implementers:  IS&C

Project Beneficiaries:   Campus

Problem Statement

The UCSB Registration and Curriculum Systems are designed for powerful and efficient transaction processing to move students from admission to graduation. As is common with transaction processing systems, the Registration and Curriculum Systems are not optimized for analysis and reporting. The mainframe database reflects the Registration system and Curriculum system business processes and therefore is not designed to efficiently support reporting needs that require data joins not inherent in those business processes.

Administrators and academic departments would benefit from an enhancement to the existing Data Warehouse that exposes Registration and Curriculum data in a manner that allows joining this with existing data warehouse data entities, and integrates with existing report-writing and data-analysis software. The IS&C Data Warehouse development team has successfully implemented tools and security for UCSB financial data for reporting and analysis. These same organizational processes and methods will be used to meet the campus need for access to Registration and Curriculum data.

Project Summary

Integrating Registration and Curriculum data into the existing Data Warehouse is an ongoing process. The initial goals of this proposal are to:

1. Achieve the initial integration of Registration and Curriculum entities with existing data warehouse entities and concept.
2. Provide initial data access to selected individuals and develop a more complex roles-based security access control over time.
3. Provide a method by which the data being integrated is kept current on a periodic basis (the duration of the period to be daily, weekly, or monthly).
4. Provide an initial set of data access capabilities (canned reports) that address the needs of the campus as they are known at this time.

In addition to the initial goals, this proposal provides for an ongoing process by which the integration of Registration and Curriculum data with existing data is enhanced. It also provides for data access capabilities (canned reports) and ad-hoc data access requests are on a case-by-case basis.

Once the Data Warehouse project is complete, the next generation data warehouse tools for UCSB should be investigated within the NBA@UCSB team framework.

Costs and Benefits

This effort will greatly expand the capabilities and efficiency of departments by allowing flexible analysis of data as new questions and requirements arise without funding a programmer to write each additional customer report. Examples of data accessibility requests from organizations and the benefits of addressing those requests are:

1. Institutional Research requests and benefits:
   1. Streamline the lengthy and labor-intensive production of the annual Academic Unit Profiles.
   2. Provide greater agility to respond to UCOP and UCSB management requests for information.
   3. Free up analysts to do analysis rather than data gathering.
2. College of Letters and Science requests and benefits:
   1. Provide the Dean with curriculum planning tool.
   2. Enable timely monitoring of student course load minimums.
   3. Enable timely monitoring of Regents Scholars.
   4. Enable analysis on "time to degree."
3. Institutional Advancement requests and benefits:
   1. Provide access to degree data in support of development efforts.
4. Graduate Division requests and benefits:
   1. Simplify the ability to combine graduate student course load and degree data with graduate student payroll data already available in the Data Warehouse.
5. Student Affairs requests and benefits:
   1. Provide simple and fast query access on student data elements to support VC needs.
   2. Enable the Registrar's Office to distribute more standard reports electronically.
6. Academic Department requests and benefits:
   1. Greatly reduce the lengthy and labor-intensive preparation of reports for academic program reviews.
   2. provide decision support reports not currently available in STAR such as enrollment trends, enrollment vs. capacity.

FERPA and Not For Release policies will be considered at design time to ensure those policies are enforced.

The following represents the one-time and recurring costs associated with this proposal.

Project Timeline

Assuming a start data of not later than the end of September 2004, initial goals of this proposal (initial data integration, initial data update processes implementation, and initial canned reports) will be achieved as follows. An initial version of the capabilities will be made available as a prototype to a test group before the end of fiscal year 2004/05. The final implementation of the initial goals will be made generally available by the beginning of Fall Term 2005. This schedule is based on initial statements of requirements and preliminary analysis of those requirements statements. Requirement clarification and further analysis may have significant impacts on the time/cost to complete.

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