Data virtualization layer feeds logical data warehouse, Agile BI
At the start of 2015, Indiana University found itself saddled with a 15-year-old data warehouse that stored a limited set of operational data and wasn’t being used for analytics in a concerted way. Looking to improve decision-making, university officials mapped out a new strategy — one that resulted in the deployment of a data virtualization layer to create a logical data warehouse and BI environment.
Data virtualization software from Denodo Technologies is used to combine data from various source systems, both on premises and in the cloud. A team of data analysts and architects creates blended views of data sets in Denodo’s platform and builds dashboards and data visualizations for business users with Tableau’s self-service BI tools, using an Agile BI process to plan and manage projects.
The virtualized approach helped accelerate the initial implementation, said Dan Young, IU’s chief data architect and manager of enterprise business intelligence. The university bought the Denodo software in July 2015 and put a production version of the data virtualization architecture in place late that year, he said.
IU was also able to avoid the need to invest in a full-fledged BI platform, according to Young. Instead, his team does data curation and analysis in the data virtualization layer. The Tableau dashboards and data visualizations are then documented in a report catalog that’s part of Data Cookbook, a data governance tool developed by IData Inc. for use by colleges and universities.
Partly because of the decision not to buy a conventional BI software suite, an initial $12 million budget that was expected to fund the project until mid-2017 should now carry it through to the end of 2019, Young said. He added that the budget covers software costs, additional staffing, training and other expenses related to the project, which is known as the Decision Support Initiative (DSI).
The existing Oracle data warehouse contains data on student registrations and other transactional records, Young said. It supports operational reporting on business functions, but the data isn’t updated in a timely way and many of the data definitions used by different departments, schools and campuses are inconsistent. As a result, the warehouse isn’t a good fit for analyzing trends and business strategies. We’re trying to get the right information into the hands of high-level people looking to make decisions. The DSI project is meant to remedy that. “We’re trying to get the right information into the hands of high-level people looking to make decisions on things like how to structure programs,” Young said. That includes top university administrators plus deans, department chairs and other workers across IU’s flagship campus in Bloomington and its eight satellite locations. All told, several hundred people are using Tableaubased on metrics generated by the BI software, he noted. The data virtualization layer is connected to transactional systems running in Oracle, SQL Server and MySQL databases, as well as a learning management system that runs in the AWS cloud and stores its data in the Amazon Redshift data warehouse. The data virtualization software can also pull data from various external web services that IU uses.
