The Administrative Information Access Strategy (AIAS) Project currently underway in Administrative Systems seeks to analyze the university's administrative reporting needs and produce a strategy and architecture to support future access to enterprise data. The technologies that provide the ease and efficiency with which we now get answers from the Internet can allow Stanford to simplify how users get to their data while providing more access than ever before.
Virtually all of Stanford's administrative data is captured today in large, monolithic transaction processing systems that optimize the associated data structures for transaction processing. These data structures are not efficient, however, for retrieving detailed information for analysis or for interacting with integrated data across multiple subject areas. Furthermore, Stanford currently maintains multiple reporting environments based on multiple tools that confuse users, cost the university multiple licensing and support costs, and encourage duplicate data storage and multiple versions of "the truth".
Addressing these issues, the AIAS Project will produce a roadmap describing a direction and high-level requirements for a new strategy, along with an actionable plan for implementation. Project deliverables will be based on user requirements gathered through interviews with representative users of administrative data. The Project will focus on answering the following key questions:
- What are the information access needs of Stanford's administrative community?
- How are these needs being met today, and what outstanding gaps currently exist?
- What common subject areas and conformed entities are needed across organizations and departments?
- What Business Intelligence tools are recommended for use at Stanford?
- In what phases will the strategy be realized?
- How much will it cost and when?
- What happens if Stanford does not implement a coordinated strategy?
- What do data owners need to provide to their staff, vendors, and funding sources?
The AIAS project began in early March and is slated for completion by the end of May 2006.
For more information, please contact AIAS Project Manager, Javier Ruiz or Data Management & Reporting Services Director, Melanie Purdy.
