Overview
Over the past decade, organizations have been making significant investments in the areas of business intelligence: data warehousing, performance management, enhanced reporting, and analytical solutions. While many enterprises and educational institutions have realized clear value from these initiatives, even more continue to seek to identify new opportunities to seize the greater value from these investments and leverage the information going forward.
Dashboards and Report Development
The University of California Office of the President has identified ERMIS as the dashboard reporting solution that will be used to provide business users with relevant and actionable information regarding their KPIs. It will allow them to make decisions in a more efficient manner than they could with existing resources and without a dashboard reporting functionality.
ERMIS as a business intelligence tool will be an integral part of the data warehousing architecture that will be used to navigate through the data acquired from the various sources. The business intelligence derived from dashboard and scorecard reporting is far more than a technical project. It requires an understanding of the University's processes and the environments in which the information is produced and where it will be consumed.
A number of core functional requirements were gathered and examined prior to the development of the ERMIS dashboards. Those requirements describe functionalities and capabilities needed by such a system in order overcome existing basic business challenges.
Report Types
When it comes to the exchange of data, it is understood that internal, operational, and consumer-facing reports are the primary vehicles for the communication of information in the UC environment. Capabilities of ERMIS include the following:
- Standard Reports
- Dashboards
- Guided Analytics / Interactive Reports
- Personalized Reports
- Managed Ad hoc Reports
- Alerts and Notifications
- Syndicated Reports
- Cohort Analysis
- Visualizations
Based on the results of user discussions on report types, the enterprise reporting solution should be intuitive enough to encourage broad adoption across various user communities in support of current and future risk management initiatives.
Implementation
The implementation of dashboard reports and associated data is expected to occur in waves. The initial launch of dashboard reports includes 11 KPIs focused on various aspects of Safety and is entitled "Safety Index". Future KPI dashboard reports will be developed and implemented during a system-wide growth phase. Subsequent rollouts will include both campus and medical center locations. With a continued focus on risk management, potential KPI development activities involve collaboration with the following subject areas:
- Medical Centers
- Human Resources
- Waste Reduction and Recycling
- Environmental Health and Safety
It is anticipated that among these subject areas, there will be other domains where dashboard and related reports can be specified to meet the specific needs of each location.
Access and Support
The ERMIS Dashboard Portal Page allows users the ability to find, manage, organize and view UC business intelligence content such as reports, scorecards and agents. A quick tour of these features is available by selecting "Quick Tour" once access to the application has been granted.
Summary
It is the University's desire to provide a dashboard and reporting tool which will enable users to leverage information in order to make decisions and plans, and demonstrate responsiveness to requests in a timely manner. ERMIS can be customized, thus accommodating users, rather than forcing the users to conform to the tool. Such customization entails knowing your users: what information they need, how they like to receive it, and how much they want to interact with it. UC user requirements will change based on what role the users are playing at a particular time. In one role, a user may require large amounts information and open access to explore data. Perhaps in another role, the user may simply need to review summary data on a weekly or monthly basis. Fundamentally, ERMIS is designed to meet these and other needs by providing a single, integrated universe of identified risk-related information that cuts across common organizational units, functions, and business processes to enable coordinated and cost-effective risk responses.