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Data Management and Analytics

About Data Management and Analytics

We provide Virginia Tech data efficiently and effectively for our partners to make informed business decisions.

We work with many functional offices and technology teams to deliver a data reporting and analytics solution for the University. We support the framework and applications that our business and technology partners use to create their solutions. We support those different teams based on their unique needs. 

Services

Data Management and Analytics's primary responsibility is to set up and support solutions that allow organizations throughout VT to develop and analyze data. Below are several of those solutions.

Data Warehouse

Following industry best practices, this database houses centralized data from the different applications that run Virginia Tech. The warehouse formats the data so that business users can easily query the data without having to clean and transform the data. The warehouse was developed in the early 2000s, and many custom reporting solutions produced by different departments rely on the structure as the truth to many University metrics.

Self Service Analytics

The primary reporting tool used at Virginia Tech is MicroStrategy. Though Data Management and Analytics supports and maintains the tool, the business users have full control over the reports and dashboards. They can create and manage their reports without having to wait on a technology team. MicroStrategy in 2020 was rated by Gartner as the best reporting product for enterprise organizations.

Ellucian Insights

We support an analytics product recently released by Ellucian. This product resides in the cloud and uses a standard data model designed around higher education best practices. The product includes advanced metrics, trending, comparisons with other universities, and basic machine learning algorithms. It is envisioned that in time, Virginia Tech will benefit from visualizations created by other universities using Ellucian Analytics.

Data Lake

We are currently developing and supporting the centralized data lake at Virginia Tech. The Data Lake is where data scientists and business analysts can combine traditional transactional data with many of the newer forms of data like weblogs and Internet of Things (IOT) data.

Data Integration

We support integrations between different applications that Virginia Tech has purchased. As Virginia Tech buys more third-party hosted applications, the need for analytics across these platforms is growing. Data integration is also pulling the data into a central data lake where analytics can be performed across these multiple platforms.

Business Areas Supported

We support many central offices and distributed offices. Below are the main business areas we support.

  • Finance
  • Accounts Receivable
  • Fixed Assets
  • Research (Proposals and Grants)
  • Foundation
  • Human Resources
  • Payroll
  • General (Person / Shared Data)
  • Student / Academic
  • Undergraduate Admissions
  • Graduate Admissions
  • Course Evaluation (SPOT)
  • Facilities (Parking Services)
  • Centralized Technology

Contact Us

 

If you have any questions or would like to know more about the Data Management and Analytics team, please feel free to reach out to us using the above information.