Business Intelligence for NWTC
Ideal State at NWTC
Definition of Business Intelligence
Business Intelligence has the objective of monitoring, reporting on and analyzing business operations.
Business Intelligence technologies provide historical, current, and predictive views of business
operations. Common functions of business intelligence technologies are reporting, Online Analytical
Processing (OLAP), analytics, data mining, business performance management, benchmarks, text mining,
and predictive analytics. Business Intelligence is not involved in running business operations but in
looking for ways of making those operations more efficient and more effective.
There are three types of Business Intelligence - strategic Business Intelligence, tactical Business
Intelligence and operational Business Intelligence. Strategic and tactical Business Intelligence provides
useful information or measurements about college performance. Operational Business Intelligence is
used to manage and optimize daily college operations.
Below is a high level overview of how the three types of Business Intelligence interrelated.
Future State at NWTC
NWTC Business Intelligence Process
Since Business Intelligence is an enterprise-wide evolving environment that is continually improved and
enhanced based on feedback from the college community, the system for capturing, producing,
analyzing and deploying Business Intelligence is rolled out in iterative releases. The process is driven and
the metrics evaluated by the NWTC Data Advisory Team. The Data Advisory Team includes members
across the college who are representative of the various college process areas.
The roadmap that NWTC follows for development of each release is outlined below:
Justification Stage
Step 1 - Business Case Assessment
Planning Stage
Step 2 – Enterprise Infrastructure Evaluation (Technical and Non Technical)
Step 3 – Project Planning
Business Analysis Stage
Step 4 – Project Requirements Definition
Step 5 - Data Analysis
Step 6 - Application Prototyping
Step 7 – Meta Data Repository Analysis
The Design Stage
Step 8 - Database Design
Step 9 – Extract /Transform/Load (ETL Process)
Step 10 – Meta Data Repository Design
The Construction Stage
Step 11 – Extract /Transform/Load Development
Step 12 Application Development
Step 13 – Data Mining
Step 14 Meta Data Repository Development
The Deployment Stage
Step 15 Implementation
Step 16 Release Evaluation
Current State at NWTC
NWTC has currently defined and validated 63 measures used to create the existing Business Intelligence
reports. NWTC has 2600 plus PeopleSoft reports. The 63 measures were define and validated by the
NWTC Data Advisory Team. The current NWTC Business Intelligence system is based solely on
information collected from the PeopleSoft Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system.
The Business Intelligence system is a working Data Warehouse with limited student and finance
reporting. It uses a SharePoint as user interface and data is updated nightly. The NWTC Business
Intelligence platform is accessible through the employee Intranet.