BI Solutions for Sponsored Research Reporting and Analysis

Presentation Summary

Aaron Waltz, University of Illinois
Co-Presented by:
Beth Ladd, University of Illinois

Effective information solutions to support sponsored research are more important than ever in today’s climate of declining budgets and changes in regulations governing grants administration, such as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). However, grants reporting poses a number of challenges. Grants data may reside in multiple systems. Information needs are diverse and span different types of customers. Grants data is fairly complex to use and understand, especially for business users and faculty researchers who often do not have financial expertise. To address these challenges, the Decision Support department at the University of Illinois created a set of solutions for Grants reporting and analysis. A product plan was created to define the primary types of information needs, data sources, data marts, and what BI capabilities would offer effective solutions. The product plan was also used to identify and scope a set of projects that could be executed separately but that resulted in building a comprehensive, interconnected solution. This includes a set of grants data marts, with ad-hoc query and analysis. Additionally, prototyping is underway for grants dashboards to provide graphical summaries and trend information, as well as an OLAP cube to support dynamic analysis of the grant lifecycle.