More than 70,000 students enroll each year at the University of Illinois, which offers more than 150 fields of study in 30 colleges, free-standing schools, and institutes across 3 campuses: Chicago, Springfield, and Urbana-Champaign (US). The university, one of the original land-grant colleges, opened its doors in 1867, and since then has awarded more than 500,000 degrees.
The Urbana-Champaign campus houses the largest public engineering library and third-largest academic library in the US, after Harvard and Yale. The university is recognized as a world-class center for medical, computing, engineering, and agricultural research. Faculty and staff, for example, built the first computer owned entirely by a university; developed a computer-based learning system; and created Mosaic, the first popular computer browser. Its Chicago-based Medical Center is well-known for organ transplantation and research into diabetes. Nearly twenty faculty and alumni have received Nobel Prizes, and sixteen have won Pulitzer Prizes. Alumni have also created leading companies such as Oracle Corp., Netscape Communications, and Siebel Systems. Its annual operating budget is more than $3.6 billion (USD), and sponsored research exceeds $600 million (USD).
Business Problem
As an extension of a university-wide initiative in 2001 to replace the university's course systems, the question became how to access data and report on it using the new enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. The university planned to implement the ERP system in phases, enabling it to develop a system incrementally, and to design in stages the output required to meet users' needs. Based on the depth and breadth of the university's core systems, the development of a centralized system incrementally allowed each department's and business unit's needs to be assessed and met.
The issue associated with the new implementation involved whether to use the ERP system for report generation, or to leverage the features and functionality of a system tailor-made to provide these features. With the help of Linda Bair, executive director of Illinois University, a decision support (DS) group was created. Bair had done the required research to determine which type of software would meet the needs of the university's reporting and analysis requirements. The decision to create a data warehousing architecture with a business intelligence (BI) layer on top seemed to best meet the organization's business requirements. The DS group's responsibility was to develop a data warehousing and reporting environment, which would provide users access to the information they needed for reporting and analysis.
The data warehousing group was directly aligned with the development of the ERP system. As each module was built, the DS group identified the reporting needs of the associated departments. The DS group developed the data warehousing, reporting, and BI structure as an application layer on top of the ERP system to identify the required data needed from the system. By identifying the reporting and analysis needs in parallel with the ERP system, the DS group was able to identify the requirements that would later be transferred to help in vendor selection. Although the data warehouse was being built simultaneously, application layer development required the tools of a third party vendor. With this structure in place, the choice of BI vendor became key.
The Challenges of a Business Intelligence Implementation: A Case Study
Lyndsay Wise - October 27, 2006
Page 2 of 4
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To identify the appropriate BI tool, the University of Illinois took a user-centered approach. Focus groups were established to interview over 200 users from various user communities to identify requirements. The needs assessment was two-fold. Firstly, it would identify the requirements for static reports; and secondly, it would assess the functionality for ad hoc reports that would enable users to create their own reports. One of the key needs of user-enabled report building was a user-friendly environment. Due to the new ERP implementation, user focus would be concentrated on the new enterprise-wide system, as opposed to access to data for reporting. Additionally, the DS group identified several static reports, such as standardized budgets and student lists. Based on the focus group results, a team of core users was chosen to help with the software selection process. This selection extended beyond the simple features and functionality provided by vendors. In addition to the criteria collected, the vendor's scalability, growth, costs, support, and technical expertise were taken into account.
Additional vendor criteria to take into account:
* scalability—the ability to meet the growth requirements of an organization with minimal impact on performance and cost
* growth—how the vendor compares in the market, and what it is doing to expand functionality by improving on its strengths and overcoming its challenges
* costs—the price of the software, licenses, servers, support, future releases, and upgrades
* support—the level of support provided by the vendor (gauged from vendor service-level agreements [SLAs], as well as references)
* technical expertise—expertise at the vendor level, and the ability to transfer that expertise to the user community
With the results captured, the DS group shortlisted five vendors and selected for vendor presentations using a sub-set of the university's data. After the demonstrations, the university chose Business Objects, for two main reasons. The first reason was scalability regarding the ability of its servers to accommodate large amounts of data and to leverage data from all required data sources. The second reason was its ease of use from the user perspective, due to its web-enabled environment.
The DS group wanted to keep the core focus on users, to keep the project business-focused as opposed to information technology (IT)-centered. The issue surrounding this strategy was the ability of the IT staff to leverage their expertise of technology and to anticipate the requirements based on their knowledge of the ERP system without overshadowing the needs of users. Additionally, the various business units would have a feeling of ownership over the process and implemented system, which would transfer into user buy-in.
Critical success factors:
* advantageous SLAs with vendors
* user focus (as opposed to IT focus)
* flexible architecture
* robust research and development (R&D) on the vendor side
* satisfaction of needs based on request for proposal (RFP)
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Across all three campuses, there are over 4,500 standardized report users who source reports from the data warehouse, or directly from the ERP system. Also, 2,000 of those report users are people using ad hoc reporting functionality. Additionally, over 1,000 (this is the most current number) users are classified as active users, meaning they run a query at least once a month to access data and perform analyses. Although Business Objects is the vendor software being maintained, users can use any other program to access and run queries against the data warehouse.
Additional vendor criteria to take into account:
- scalability—the ability to meet the growth requirements of an organization with minimal impact on performance and cost
- growth—how the vendor compares in the market, and what it is doing to expand functionality by improving on its strengths and overcoming its challenges
- costs—the price of the software, licenses, servers, support, future releases, and upgrades
- support—the level of support provided by the vendor (gauged from vendor service-level agreements [SLAs], as well as references)
- technical expertise—expertise at the vendor level, and the ability to transfer that expertise to the user community
With the results captured, the DS group shortlisted five vendors and selected for vendor presentations using a sub-set of the university's data. After the demonstrations, the university chose Business Objects, for two main reasons. The first reason was scalability regarding the ability of its servers to accommodate large amounts of data and to leverage data from all required data sources. The second reason was its ease of use from the user perspective, due to its web-enabled environment.
The DS group wanted to keep the core focus on users, to keep the project business-focused as opposed to information technology (IT)-centered. The issue surrounding this strategy was the ability of the IT staff to leverage their expertise of technology and to anticipate the requirements based on their knowledge of the ERP system without overshadowing the needs of users. Additionally, the various business units would have a feeling of ownership over the process and implemented system, which would transfer into user buy-in.
Critical success factors:
- advantageous SLAs with vendors
- user focus (as opposed to IT focus)
- flexible architecture
- robust research and development (R&D) on the vendor side
- satisfaction of needs based on request for proposal (RFP)
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