Apr. 28, 2021
POSTED IN: RICE > News and Events

A Data Driven Campus: Enterprise Data and Business Intelligence

by Kensly Alexander

campus sunrise

The Enterprise Data and Business Intelligence (EDBI) group is responsible for development and management of Rice’s Data Warehouse and Business Intelligence (Tableau) ecosystem. As a team, our goal is a data driven campus that allows for access to accurate and timely data, cross functional analysis, and fostering a culture of data literacy.

Rice’s Data Warehouse is a centralized data repository that integrates both academic and administrative data from many disparate sources to support analytics. The Data Warehouse stores large quantities of historical data to support analytical reporting, predictive analytics, and machine learning to create actionable insights.

Some benefits of a data warehouse are:

  • Better decision making
  • Consolidates data from many sources
  • Data quality, consistency, and accuracy
  • Historical intelligence

The Data Warehouse and the Data Governance Council are tightly coupled at Rice. Data governance is critical to a successful data driven culture in an organization as shown below:

Data governance is the bedrock of a data-driven campus

The Data Governance Council is composed of Rice’s valued data trustees and stewards. This council is responsible for ensuring Rice’s data assets are accurate and well defined. The Data Stewards Advisory Group (DSAG) is the council’s working group composed of stakeholders from departments such as FE&P, Finance, Office of the Registrar, Rice Business, Office of Research, Faculty, Development, Learning Management Systems, Institutional Effectiveness, Institutional Research, Undergraduate Admissions, and Graduate Admissions. This group meets quarterly and focuses on the people, processes, and technologies that support a data driven culture.

Some of the key data governance initiatives are:

  • Data access and security
  • Collaboration tools supporting data stewardship
  • Business data glossary
  • Data quality
  • Data life cycle management
  • Training related to data literacy and data awareness

The EDBI team is currently working on several strategic initiatives for the Data Warehouse, with more data integration efforts planned for this year. In partnership with the DSAG, we will continue building the pillars to a data driven culture at Rice. For more information on the EDBI team, Rice’s Data Warehouse, Tableau, and Data Governance, visit https://data.rice.edu.

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