University of Newcastle

The University of Newcastle in New South Wales - ranked in Australia's top 10 universities for research – has implemented a SAS® data warehouse management reporting solution to improve decision making through better quality, more accurate and timelier reporting; to better understand its student demographics and characteristics and other key components of its environment; and to better manage the information flowing from a very large number of disparate data sources.

With its main campus in Newcastle – Australia’s sixth-largest city – and others on the central and north coasts of New South Wales and in Singapore, the university has some 26,000 students, including 3,500 international students.

Sandra Sirasch, the University of Newcastle’s Director of Corporate Information, heads the SAS implementation and says the main motivation for the new data warehouse was to be able to better monitor the university’s performance across eight defined areas. These are Student Characteristics and Enrollment; Teaching and Learning; Research; Finance and Resources; International; Staffing, Marketing and Reputation; Corporate Development; and Community Partnerships.

“Having decided that these eight areas within a consolidated data warehouse would give us the basis for the improved management capabilities that we wanted, we then went looking for the necessary data sources that would enable us to monitor and report on them. This part of the exercise involved a large number of workshops and consultation sessions across the university in which we went through each of the eight areas and drew up detailed lists. These were also valuable in securing buy-in from the many parties whose cooperation we needed,” Sirasch explains.

“There was quite a bit of overlap in these lists, but they were appropriately aggregated and proved really important because – after the building of the data warehouse and designing of the reporting – they give us the means of providing a dashboard across the entire university,” she says.

“It was then that we went looking for the tools to help us, and we eventually chose the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Suite for Academia together with SAS Enterprise Miner. We checked around the higher education sector and found that SAS was well-accepted. Another was that SAS is used by both the Australian Government Department of Education, Science and Training (now the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations) and UAC (University Admissions Centre). We draw a lot of our data from UAC, and while this didn’t determine our decision for SAS, it was naturally a comfort factor.”

The SAS solution delivers a single management interface for server setup, metadata management and user management, making for ease of use and minimal impact on the IT infrastructure.

Although Sirasch and her team were able to access and consolidate the information they needed before implementing the university’s new data warehouse management reporting solution, the processes were cumber-some, and people were skeptical about accuracy, given the different core systems providing the data, and time delays.

Sirasch says, “While able to query some of the source systems ourselves, in the past, often we would have to ask the owners of the core systems to write queries for us, and there would be a delay before we got the answers. Now, we write one query against one consolidated database. We control the scheduling, and so the information is more easily available to us and sooner. This is a big benefit.

“Whereas we could previously get high-level information readily enough – for example, the number of students enrolled in a particular course – by a number of steps, we now have all the information available in one place. We can now go looking for student-related at-tributes that we didn’t previously have access to. Having the right tools definitely makes life much easier.”

She adds that, as a next stage, the university will deploy SAS Performance Management and then, “We will get into what I’m calling ‘serious’ performance reporting: drilling down for very precise information.”

With strategic performance management capabilities, the University of Newcastle will be able to map individual missions to key performance metrics as well as manage enrollments strategically. “We are not just using the data warehouse for performance reporting. We are moving towards using the system as our main reporting tool for a whole lot of snapshot capability, as well,” Sirasch says.

She elaborates: “There are so many aspects to each of the eight areas we are addressing. In the case of Student Characteristics and Enrollment, for example, we need to know how students like or dislike their courses; how we compare with other universities in respect of attracting international students; the opportunities for overseas experience for our students compared with students elsewhere; and equity. Equity, is an important sub-area within Student Characteristics in which we look at students from disadvantaged backgrounds and aboriginal students, how they came to us, how they are performing and so on. Knowing this, we can better support students in their experience here at the university.”

All of this knowledge is important for the ongoing well-being of the university. Among other things, being able to analyze this knowledge helps gauge the effectiveness of third-party course providers for students who undertake part of their study overseas; understand the relative merits of the qualifications and approaches students employ to gain admission; and know whether they came through the UAC, what were the UAI (University Admissions Index) distributions and so on.

The other seven areas of the data warehouse are equally finely segmented. For example, analysis in the Corporate Development and Community Partnerships area helps identify graduates who might be persuaded to return for post-graduate awards, opportunities for cooperation with the commercial sector and the development of programs to support the wider community.

Data Warehouse Manager Paul Hughes identifies a number of significant benefits derived from the warehouse project so far. First, the process of abstracting a simplified model of the core systems while still capturing the essential data has led to a much bet-ter understanding of those systems and how they are used. This, in turn, allows feedback to the system managers with suggestions for improved processes to better address the university’s strategic needs.

Also, with regard to the student warehouse model implemented by the SAS contractors, historical data is now much more readily accessible. Although the data is there in the core system (it is, after all, the source for the warehouse), the database structure can be queried confidently only by analysts with extensive knowledge and skills. In the warehouse, a few straightforward queries can provide for a range of reports, both snapshots at any point in time and yearly summaries. The OLAP cube provides for an easily manipulated range of time series analyses. Greater scope for the existing cube and additional cubes are planned.

While much has been achieved, Sirasch acknowledges there is still much to be done. She is certain her team is on the right track and makes an important point: “One of the things that was a big plus here – and I’d advocate it for any university – was deciding that the project’s business owner would be Corporate Information rather than IT. Corporate Information is the prime user, after all. A lot of data warehouses are put into the IT environment, and this generally results in the organization not really understanding what to do with them. When that happens, the organization finds itself with systems that have a whole lot of data but no structure around them. Here, we consciously went for a logical business structure and reporting environment first and then started to collect the data, rather than the other way around.”

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