The Rapid Response Data Mart

Presentation Summary

Rachel Gatlin, University of Washington
Co-Presented by:
Joseph DeVore, University of Washington

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) introduced stringent new reporting standards for research and projects funded by stimulus funds. The pressures of ARRA's timelines and requirements threw out normal planning practices and required a rapid response. In under four months the UW developed an incredibly successful data mart based system for reporting that reduced the required human effort by over 98% compared to a proposed manual solution by combining data from our central DW with transactional data from areas not yet incorporated into the central DW and then building application and reporting interfaces. Presentation will include design, challenges and decisions made in the creation of the ARRA Mart, the outcomes (foreseen and unforeseen), the nature of the collaborative effort across business and technical units that had not previously worked together, and the new opportunities to improve our transaction systems, our business processes and the build out of our central DW including improvements to an area currently in the process of building out in our central DW. Our "Rapid Response Data Mart" for ARRA demonstrates the value of using all available information to enable agility and efficiency in a time of increasing regulation and decreasing funding.