Designing and Maintaining Automated Census Reports

Presentation Summary

Greg Grabowski and Jamie Balducci - Seattle University

Census reporting is an important function of many IR Offices since it provides the official statistics for institutions. By definition, Census reports not only need to show an information snapshot at a given point in time but they also have to be accurate, available, perform well, and be reproduced anytime. In my presentation, I will describe how IR at Seattle U was able to move from manually generated Census reports to a more streamlined and automated reporting solution. Key elements of the transition include: 1. Creation of a Data Warehouse with point in time functionality 2. IR and OIT team collaboration 3. Development of an override table to correct unresolved data errors for Census Reports, if needed. 4. Used the flexible report design in Microsoft Reporting Services to integrate static census reporting with ‘’current’’ reporting. 5. Utilizing a custom table for managing census dates with the metadata required for reporting. 6. Successful integration of custom tables within data warehouse schema.