The University of Technology Sydney (UTS) is moving to provide greater access to information for staff, academics and students through a review and revamp of its reporting systems.
The university has so far upgraded its Student Management portal application, which services around 33,000 students, to a .Net framework and has moved from Crystal Reports to IBM Cognos 8.3 as its common reporting platform.
“The goal is to review the whole reporting around the university and give the users what they need to do their jobs,” student systems implementation project manager at the university, Miranda Brookes, said.
“In future staff will go into one point and be able to run a student systems report or BI dashboards, whereas at the moment they have to run a BI report and then log into the student system and run a student system report.”
The move to Cognos has saved the university hundreds of thousands in licensing costs, eased the future integration of systems into a single information platform, and increased the utilisation of existing Cognos skills at the university, Brookes said.
With the deployment the university can generate customised reports and automate standard processes, as well as gaining real time reporting and the ability to attach barcodes to reports, assign batch jobs and scheduling.
"At the moment staff and students go through the Student Management application to request reports," Brookes said. "In the future we’d like to think that instead of going through the Cognos dashboard… [students, academics, staff] should be able to log on to Cognos and see the same data and pull the same reports; get that one view of the truth."
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