Collaborative BI in a Distributed World

Presentation Summary

Aaron Walz; University of Illinois

Collaborative BI in a Distributed World



BI can add huge value in Higher Education, but it's not easy. It requires a high level of collaboration across parts of the organization that don't normally have to work quite so closely together. Complicating this, in many institutions the work of BI is distributed among many different offices, each with their own staff and their own agenda. This is certainly true at the University of Illinois. Despite a mature, successful implementation, we still face many challenges. We've been successful in bringing more data to more people. An unfortunate outcome of this is many offices establishing their own data kingdoms built on extracts from the Data Warehouse. In the name of self-service BI, we killed the "report fairy" that delivered canned mainframe reports to people's desks. In fact, self-service BI has been so successful that we now have dozens (if not hundreds) of different versions of the same basic reports that each department builds and maintains for themselves. We need better collaboration! This session will propose a future state for a collaborative approach to BI in Higher Ed, and offer some thoughts on how to get there. There will also be a group discussion on what does and doesn't work.