Customer Stories

Swinburne University of Technology

Swinburne Builds on Intelligence with SAS®

Universities are not only responsible for ensuring all course information is up-to-date, they also need systems in place to ensure all staff and student details are accurate. This makes the information department one of the most important as any glitches could affect the work or educational status of hundreds of people.

Victoria's Swinburne University of Technology has a strong reputation in Australia and overseas as a provider of career-orientated education and as a university with a heavy focus on research. The university has a strong technology base, which is complemented by a number of innovative specialist research centers that attract international attention.

Richard Constantine is chief information officer and director of IT at the university. His department is responsible for all IT services within the university and has a substantial budget. Two years ago, a pilot project was established – known as Information System Integration Strategy (ISIS). The aim of ISIS is to provide a business intelligence solution that will effectively allow data to be integrated across all the university's systems.

Pilot aims for data integration
The IT department is responsible for three main areas: client services, infrastructure, and information systems. The latter involves all the university's software development and support for core systems. It is this area that is the focus of ISIS.

When ISIS was first set up, Constantine evaluated what was required for the project and assessed the latest tools on the market to help it build a business intelligence solution.

"We were one of the first educational sites to adopt SAS – having purchased our first solution 20 years ago – so we were keen to see whether they had a solution to assist us," Constantine says.

Constantine went with Oracle for portal integration tools, and for business intelligence software it purchased the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform.

"We evaluated a number of products, but SAS came out the best," Constantine says. "Research from Meta and Gartner also stated that they believed SAS was the leader in this field."

One of the issues the university was facing with data integration was that it wasn't instantaneous. "For example, students might enroll and the admissions staff would enter them into the system," Constantine explains. "They might then go off and try and borrow a book from the library but find they weren't on the library's system. This might be because all updates are done once a day in batch mode so they wouldn't appear on the library's system for another day."

Meeting changes expectations
Constantine says this wasn't good enough as people now expect certain outcomes to be done in real-time. "It is critical to get student data installed immediately," he says. "Staff also need to have their details updated in real-time, including their finance details and e-mail addresses set up."

Constantine says there was also a need to get a return on investment quickly. "By May 2004 we were given the green light to proceed with the pilot and since then we have been building the integration strategy platform and running pilots for evaluation. We hope to go live with ISIS by next January and have the entire system running within two years."

There are three pilots underway as part of ISIS: building a portal that is accessible by staff, students and the public with different levels of authentication, building a data warehouse, and cleansing of management data.

On target to deliver
"At this stage, because the projects are all being developed as pilots, we need to prove they are working before we get the final go-ahead," Constantine says. "However, we are going well. There have been no major issues, and we are on target to deliver successful outcomes by early next year."

Constantine says the university was also pleased to be one of the first sites to work with SAS®9 and is now migrating all its existing SAS solutions onto the new platform.

"The solution wasn't cheap, but we are being so well looked after by SAS," Constantine says. "I found the SAS staff incredibly interested in our business and would move mountains to help us with what we required. Their customer service is exceptional."