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 through March. Over the next three 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) was completed and tested in October. Sprint 2 Jasper Report development and testing and database performance tuning was completed in November; Phase 1 was completed in December and put into a limited rollout on December 18th. Full community rollout is expected mid to late January.
MIT Data Warehouse
The Data Warehouse concentrate a great deal of effort in support pack testing for SAP, verifying data, data extract and load procedures, and supporting central departmental testing. We also added five new data subject areas were added in Q2 (IR Honors & Awards, IAP schedule (meet time and meet location) data for IAP subjects (credit subjects), created masked production data for Stellar for testing the Blackboard application, Graduate Admissions application and education history data for DCAD and DLC users who "download" data from Grade20, and Subject Evaluation data. The OSE application will query the subject evaluation in Data Warehouse to generate the HTML pages/reports to display on the web. This has been completed in Test and ready for production. There were also a significant amount of data enhancements and testing & verification done in support of the Payroll Edacca to make access control easier to manage, enhancing financial data (add payment and PO-related information to Financial detail, addingnew logic to map Library Items with Reserve Catalog, Cleaning Reserve Catalog DW data to allow for integration of ISBN.org price feed into OTI, incorporating WORK date fields into the Appointment History in support of the Assistant Deans, DRS also added IAP Course Schedule data to the Opendata wiki in support of CoursePicker and OTI. We completed the analysis and design of the reporting scheme for bringing Travel data in from the Concur Travel System and non-credit IAP data in support of CoursePicker.
Managed Data Services
MDS-IR Honors and Awards was completed in December. DRS also built a simple Microsoft Access User Interface for IR to create and update data in the MDS. DRS is also loading this data into Data Warehouse for reporting use by 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. We have completed the analysis, design and have begun implementation.
Roles /perMIT
Fixed a few bugs found during the phased rollout during Q1 and completed the MIT community rollout of the Roles User Interface that will replace the current PowerBuilder application. We delivered 8 new Roles UI Demos; training 70 people and 2 individually We have continued 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 writing stored procedures and web CGI script for maintaining Functions in the Roles Database, replacing and expanding on that
functionality from the PowerBuilder application. The new script is running on
the test Roles Database but has not yet been moved to production.
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 Q2 we worked with the business owners to in procurement improve metadata, streamline data, and to build reports to help reconcile their business. We also worked with HR and the VPF Office to begin a pilot to deliver web based reporting to the community. We have identified 3 reports, which will be built and rolled out to a small set of DLC’s for feedback during Q3.