Key Facts
Client: Higher Education Institution
Department: Planning & BI
Tech Solution: Alteryx – Designer, Connect & Server
Challenges Faced:
- University funding reliant on complex, error-prone calculations
- Lesser transparent of data due to inter-departmental involvement
- Lack of blueprint mentality - things had to be done repeatedly
Utilising Alteryx to automate HESA Data Futures
Challenge
Building on hundreds of years of history and internationally acknowledged research excellence, our client’s Higher Education Institution attracts students from over 120 countries.
With such a large student body, preparations for HESA Data Futures, combined with GDPR compliance, as well as the desire to become a truly data driven organisation, the need for a transparent, empowering and underpinning technology platform was clear.
Our client needed a single platform that could enable everyone to work with the data they needed, produce analytical modelling as well as demonstrate the impact change can have on either side of the processes it is used in. This makes Data Lineage and the ability to do impact analysis crucial, making sure that everyone using data could be sure that it is curated and accurate as well as governed and used appropriately.
Solution
The Alteryx plaform, combined with Billigence’s implementation and product experience, allowed the institution to provide all of its users with an enterprise scale portal for all their data needs. From report catalogues and a glossary of business terms, through to approved data sources for workflows that produce the statutory returns (and all other MI/BI) and verify data quality of a continuous basis.
Alteryx Designer was used for creation of data integration workflows & advanced analytical tasks; the Alteryx Server and Connect portal was used for collaboration, end-user access to data and definitions as well as scheduling workflows.
As a result, analytics & reports became easily accessible and trustworth, giving a single source of truth to all data and the impact of change was easily identified with Data Lineage which helped visualise relationships & origins of data. The tasks in data preparation which used to be repeated by different users in different departments were now automated so they could be re-used.
Benefits
Together we were able to identify an operating model to drive a data governance-led approach to defining proactive HESA Data Futures returns processes. This approach was able to increase awareness and understanding around the eternal impact of client’s institutional, HESA dependent data.
Going forward, this approach informs the necessary tactical change and improvements across the underpinning business processes and systems which capture or generate data needed for HESA Data Futures and links People, Processes and Policies together, underpinned by technology, to begin the necessary cultural change towards how the institution manages and values data.
Now established, this technology supported operating model is being used as a blueprint for other areas.
- Definition of proactive HESA Data Futures returns processes
- Consistent, structured & targeted data collaboration across university
- Change of business processes for data generation, capture & work