Dog and Pony Show - Business Intelligence

Last week, I had the opportunity to learn about the Business Intelligence initiative in ITS. Ron Rash asked Marta Miguel, who is leading this effort, to spend an hour and a half with us to help bring me up to speed. I had two big takeaways from our time together.

Marta and her team have spent a tremendous amount of time getting out and talking to many, many people about their business processes, data they use (or don't use) to measure the effectiveness of their practices/services, and data or data views they thought would be useful in the analysis of their work. While the content and nature of those conversations is of great interest, what struck me most was the breadth of the requirements gathering. If your group is doing anything - and I mean anything - that you think might benefit from someone having had these kinds of conversations I strongly encourage you to look up Marta and pick her brain. There's a lot in there :-) .

The second observation is how this project embraces the notion of openness that I wrote about a little while ago. As the phases of this project are completed, as much business data will be available to as many people as it can be - which is a very different place than we are now. Because some of the data in discussion is subject to protections covered in law, this isn't as simple as making all data available to everyone in a coherent fashion (which in and of itself isn't trivial). So the technical challenges are significant from top to bottom but the value of the ultimate outcome will more than validate the time and energy spent on the project. This project will enable Penn State to leverage the collective intelligence in our faculty and employees by more openly sharing data in a form that makes it usable.