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 […]

Late last year, we went live with a feed of HR data from our central systems to a local system in the University’s School of Informatics.  This is now being duplicated for the School of Biological Sciences, and feeds to other schools are planned. These data feeds are needed because the old source of this […]

This month has seen slow ans steady progress on several fronts.  We don’t have a big shiny reveal to boast about, just incremental work. Much of my attention has been on staffing changes, as the funding for the data warehouse team is shifting from fixed-term to open-ended contracts.  This means that some members of staff […]

This month, we’ve been putting support procedures in place for the HR strategic reporting data mart, and addressing data questions from its first users. We’re making sure that all queries are tracked and raised by calls in Unidesk, the University’s incident tracking system.  This makes it easier to route calls to the right people to […]

Our data warehouse team are winding up work on the HR Strategic Reporting data mart, which we have developed in support of the University’s programme to replace our ancient HR and Finance processes and systems. The first release of the data mart was a year ago and contained the strategic data from the old HR […]

I’m currently experimenting with various types of modelling diagrams, with a goal of finding which work best for us.  But what do I mean by “best”, and who do I mean by “us”? The original profession of architects, i.e. the people who design buildings, have been creating 3-D models for centuries.   Minu shows some examples […]

One of the challenges we faced in designing our HR data mart was how to map the data from the old HR and Payroll system into the new data model used by the People & Money system. As an example of the problem, consider the data about which posts are funded from which sources – […]

In 2021, we in Enterprise Architecture spent a lot of time working on strategy development.  We looked at the next steps for integrating our CRM platforms with other applications and for establishing more strategic governance for CRM.  We also took several technical strategies for our Core Systems to the relevant University committees; a process which […]

This is a third post in what is becoming a series about our work on the data warehouse.  We have just handed a new release of our HR data mart to a small group of BI analysts, who will test it before we deploy the live version.  This release is significant because for the first […]

With increasing numbers of data analysts across the University using Power BI, the HR Datamart project decided to make strategic HR data available in Power BI workspaces.  We have achieved this, but it turned out to be significantly more work than we expected. Power BI is a data visualisation tool that lets analysts present information […]