A recent survey of higher education institutions by the Campus Computing Project showed that generating reports from enterprise administrative systems, such as Banner, to be among the key challenges faced by many colleges and universities. Administrative systems are primarily intended and designed to manage vital campus resources and functions – admission and financial aid, academic affairs, student life, college relations, human resources, business and finance, and more. The critical nature of the day-to-day transactions, such as tracking grades or recording donor gifts, coupled with the complexity of the thousands of tables found in such integrated databases makes administrative systems ill-suited for reporting purposes.
Reporting
Therefore, most campuses, Davidson included, run a separate reporting repository, sometimes known as data warehouse, beside the enterprise administrative system. Once a day, data is exported from our Banner system into the data warehouse. Reporting is done against the data warehouse database using Access and another reporting tool known as Focus. Reporting as it exists today at Davidson is largely thought of as a technical process due to the rather steep learning curve in understanding the various tables in the data warehouse and the associated structured query language used to retrieve and manipulate data.
The Road to Improved Reporting
Our goal is to do everything we can to simplify the process of generating reports by building a catalog of reports coupled with a new reporting tool that allows users to get or create reports without having technical expertise. Through a process of identifying needs and mapping requirements, our goal is to build a new data warehouse or to significantly improve our existing one.
Your Involvement
As we go through a methodical process of clearly defining and documenting all your needs, your involvement is essential. We especially need your assistance with the development of a data dictionary, definitions and representations of each of the entities and attributes in the Banner system.
As always, our expectation is that each of us will commit our time, resources, and energy toward a new and improved reporting system for Davidson College.
Mur Muchane
