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 […]

Earlier this month, we had a stimulating conversation with colleagues from another Scottish university, in which we compared our approaches to structuring our core data.  We share the goal of making our core data as valuable as possible, in a world where data analytics is of increasing importance.   Much data analysis now manipulates data […]

“Digital Estate” is a term we are using to describe all the IT infrastructure, data and applications that enable the university to function.  Like the physical estate (i.e. the buildings and spaces around them), the digital estate must work for the people who use it, while being safe and secure.  It requires investment and maintenance.  […]

The transformation of computing services to the cloud paradigm is an industry-wide phenomenon which presents radical challenges and opportunities to how the University provides IT services. Cloud will affect most aspects of the University’s IT, including Management, Operations, Procurement, Budgeting, Security, and Compliance. In January this year, the Knowledge Strategy Committee approved the University’s strategy […]