University System of Georgia To Install iStrategy Financial Data Warehouse

  • By Dian Schaffhauser
  • 07/09/09

The University System of Georgia (USG) has chosen the iStrategy Solutions HigherEd Analytics Suite for statewide deployment to provide financial data warehousing and business intelligence at 32 colleges and universities. The application is pre-built specifically for the three enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems most frequently used by higher education: Oracle's PeopleSoft, Sungard Higher Education's Banner Unified Digital Campus, and Datatel.

USG will use iStrategy to transform masses of PeopleSoft-based financial data pertaining to participating colleges and universities receiving state funding into a consolidated data warehouse. The data warehouse will enable users, including the Board of Regents, which is the governing body of the USG, to work interactively with budget and finance data, including online dashboards, and perform multidimensional financial data analysis on a self-service basis.

"This is an important step in strengthening financial accountability and transparency for the University System of Georgia," said Usha Ramachandran, CFO for the USG. "Our long-term strategic goals have called for the establishment of a statewide business intelligence system to enable anyone in the organization with budgetary responsibility to view and manage budget performance on their own, without help from the finance or IT departments. We are now in a position to achieve this critical goal."

"The company promises that its software will eliminate the existing data complexity and manual work currently required for budget reporting and analysis," Ramachandran said. "We will also greatly simplify the process of budget reporting to the State of Georgia and enable a new level of financial transparency. Our review process of several solutions confirmed that iStrategy would best provide these key business intelligence benefits with minimal time and very competitive cost."

USG has 283,000 students, 40,000 faculty and staff, and an annual operating budget of $6 billion.

About the Author

Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.

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