DRS continues to participate in and act as a hub for data issues in support of various Institute/Enterprise projects. Major projects for DRS are RAFT (MITBI – Reporting & Forecasting Tool), the MIT and AAUDE Data Warehouses, Managed Data Services, MITID Database, Roles/perMIT and Reporting & Consulting Services. A key member of our team, Jim Repa has announced his departure from MIT. Jim will work part-time from November through March. Over the next six months we will be transitioning Jim’s work to other members of DRS and DSPS.
RAFT (MITBI – Reporting & Forecasting Tool)
DRS has been working closely with representatives from 16 Departments, Labs and Centers and other groups across IS&T (ISDA: CCS - Content & Collaboration Services, CSS: Usability & Accessibility and Documentation & Training, and OIS: Server Operations and Database Services). Sprint 0 Design and building/implementing the infrastructure and the functionality of the base application are complete and have been tested. Sprint 1 of development (Error/bug fixing from sprint 0, Reporting, Export to Excel, Data Verification and Documentation) is in process and will be completed and tested in mid October. Sprint 2 development and testing will be finished in November, deployment will occur in December and Phase 1 will be complete.
MIT Data Warehouse
Six new data subject areas were added in Q1 (Utility Usage, Payments, Medical and Dental Insurance enrollment, Student Ethnicity Tracking, Cybersource, and ARA Funding data). There were also a significant amount of data enhancements, data testing & verification done, work in support of the MIT Libraries upgrade of Aleph and Financial fiscal year end processing. DRS also added data to the Opendata wiki in support of CoursePicker and BookPicker. Together with OIS we introduced a new backup process, which reduced weekly down time from 4 hours to 10 minutes and migrated several of our physical Unix servers to VMs running Linux. During Q2 we will be working with SAIS to implement reporting for the new Who’s Teaching What system, begin working on the analysis and design of the reporting scheme for bringing Travel data in from the Concur Travel System, bring non credit IAP data into the warehouse in support of CoursePicker, and testing of the SAP Support Packs.
AAUDE Data Warehouse
Five new data subject area were added in Q1 (IPEDS Fall Enrollment, Alumni Survey, Senior Survey, ASEE, and Student Clearinghouse Cohort Data). We enhanced six other data areas (IPEDS Finance, NSF Graduate Student Support, IPEDS Enrollment, IPEDS Institutional Characteristics, IPEDS HR, and Institutional data). Together with OIS we configure and migrated from one physical Unix server with one Oracle 9i database instance to a VM running Linux with two Oracle 10g database instances. During Q2 we will be focusing on loading more data and the web front end in support of the Council Meeting in October and in preparation for the annual meeting in April.
Managed Data Services
We currently have two Managed data Services developed. MDS-OME Student Transcripts is production and MSS-IR Honors and Awards is in user testing.
MDS-OME Student Transcripts (display of grades and GPA data from MITSIS) Oracle backend development work was completed in early July. DCAD completed the front-end development work and OME users finished testing in late summer. This service was moved to production on September 23rd.
MDS-IR Awards & Honors database structures (including tables, views, triggers) have been designed and built. Accesses to Data Warehouse data via database links are complete and IR local data has been loaded in development. We are currently assisting IR with the clean up of their data. This application was moved onto the production server the end of September and IR will begin testing and validation of data.
IR (Shirley Wong) will work with John Scanlon to build a simple MS Access user interface for IR to maintain their data. During the month of October this system will become the system of record for awards & honors data. Shortly after we will start bringing the data into Data Warehouse for reporting use but departments (such as the News Office).
During Q2 we will begin the analysis, design and implementation of our thirds MDS service for the VP of Finance. This service (MDS-Abandoned Property) will be used for maintaining and reporting on abandoned property data as required by Massachusetts Law.
MITID Database
Peggie McGrath and Jim Repa continue to work with central departments (HR, IS&T, Registrar’s Office, etc) to cleaning up duplicate Id’s. We have spent the bulk of Q1 addressing audit findings such as duplicate Id notification, Identifying suspicious / fishing activity and doing a Disaster Recovery Test. Work on audit findings is complete. During Q2 we will begin transitioning the backend non-production server, database and application support to DSPS and the front-end business and user support to other members of DRS.
Roles /perMIT
The phased rollout of the Roles User Interface that will replace the current PowerBuilder application has been completed. During Q2 we will fix the few bugs found during the phased rollout and move to a full community wide rollout. We will also continue with the transition of the backend non-production server, the database and application support to DSPS, and the front-end business and user support to other members of DRS. DRS continues to participate in the development of the new open source perMIT application.
Reporting & Consulting Services
Reporting and consulting was previously reported as part of the Data Warehouse. As new services such as RAFT and MDS evolve reporting and consulting is being extended and plays a key and role. Based on this, Reporting & Consulting Services will be reported as an independent activity within DRS.
During Q1 in conjunction with IR we developed and administered a Community Survey to gathering reporting feedback and requirements. We have reporting & consulting support for many DRS projects such as RAFT, DW, and MDS. New dashboards, customer support & training have grown. We have worked with customers such as Payroll, Sourcing, and HR to improve metadata. During Q2 we will continue to work with business owners to improve metadata and to begin identifying areas where we can streamline data for ease of use, we will embark on a pilot with the VPF Office to deliver reports via web, we will investigate new reporting tool in support of survey feedback, and look at domain based reporting.