UK's Nottingham Trent U Builds Data Warehouse with IBM Cognos BI

  • By Dian Schaffhauser
  • 11/20/09

UK's Nottingham Trent University will be implementing a data warehouse built with Cognos 8 Business Intelligence from IBM to improve its reporting and analysis capabilities in finance, human resources, space management, and student records. The warehouse will consolidate data from each department, enabling users to generate reports and dashboards and drill down on information about courses, lecture room capacity, and academic profiles, among other details.

"Higher education is a highly competitive environment and universities are large complex organizations facing challenging times in terms of public sector spending cuts," said James Lacey, director of finance. "The volume of data we have to process is mind boggling, including applications, enrolments, completion rates, and a whole number of other metrics for some 25,000 students. Turning this mass of data into meaningful management information is not a simple task."

Lacey said the warehouse was an important means to ensure administrators have the data they need for fact-based decision-making. "Many organizations rely on spreadsheets for information sharing which, by their very nature are often produced in an ad hoc manner and can lead to multiple versions," he pointed out. "Now this will be prevented by having one central source of information accessible to all."

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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