New BI Teams (building a strategic reporting capability)

I’m really pleased that we have reached a hugely significant milestone in our devlopment of a fully-fledged, cross-domain, strategic business intelligence (BI) capability. Enterprise Architecture have been working closely with the University’s Strategic Reporting team, and we both have new staff starting on open-ended contracts in our respective BI teams. We are supporting reports for the University Executive and will soon have a governance group in place to set priorities for our future work.

Our teams are using the Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) and corporate BI tools, and in particular the HR Strategic Reporting Data Mart that I’ve blogged about previously, along with the University’s central Power BI service, which is supported by our Service Management team.

Our initial collaborative project has provided extensive strategic reporting datasets to specialist BI analysts, who have remits for delivering bespoke analysis and insight to University, College and Support Group senior leadership teams and committees. The primary purpose of this type of aggregate analysis is to directly inform the decisions these leaders regularly need to take to ensure the University remains on course to achieve its stated strategic objectives.

Over time, the wider staff community will increasingly be able to take advantage of access to a range of additional strategic reporting datasets and dashboards sourced from these larger datasets, as our network of specialist BI analysts adapt for multiple purposes the reports and applications which they have developed in the first instance for the University’s senior teams.

Yesterday, we gave a seminar to university staff in which we explained more about what we have achieved so far and how the newly expanded strategic BI functions in both Governance and Strategic Planning and in Enterprise Architecture will continue to work together, with colleagues across the University, on further use of the data mart itself and on the next stage in our longer term journey to provide a joined-up, cross- domain, strategic business intelligence capability.

Members of the university can see the presentation from yesterday’s seminar at the following URL:

https://www.wiki.ed.ac.uk/display/IADLS/IS+Applications+Directorate+Lunchtime+Seminars