Cognos at The University of
Texas at Austin
Raise Your IQ!
Fred Friedrich, Associate Vice President and Controller
Cathy Lester, Director, Controller IT Services
The University of Texas at Austin
The University of Texas at Austin
Ranked 15th in
world by Times
London 2004
$1.6 Billion
Budget
$400 million in
Research
Dollars (R-1)
17,000 Faculty
and Staff
50,000+
Students
11,000 degrees awarded annually
Longhorn Pride
No. 1 Texas 45, Oklahoma 12
Baseball sweeps Florida to claim
sixth College World Series
Championship (June 2005)
Project Information Quest (IQ)
Problem Summary
  Data-rich, information-starved
  Reliable transactional systems;
weak reporting
  Programmers required to extract
information
  Coded data required
interpretation
Project Information Quest Approach
Crawl, walk, run
  Start small and grow in
manageable increments
  Measure results before
investing more
  Leverage existing systems by
adding reporting tools
Critical Success Factors
•  Trust
•  Fair Process
•  Data Stewardship / Ownership
•  Single Version of the Truth
Data Warehouse Subject Areas
Financial Info
Student Info
Alumni/Donor Info
Facilities
Human Resources Info
Research Info
Faculty & PBIS info
Project IQ Infrastructure
Activity after Phase 1 Release (1st 10 months)
•  165 People Trained
4 hours each / 39 class sections
•  180 cubes available
•  382 reports available
•  35,233 reports run by 450 people
Live Demonstration
Demonstration of how we
use Powerplay cubes to
answer business
questions
Business Scenario 1 – Resource Allocation
The Liberal Arts Dean receives competing requests for
additional Teaching Assistants (TA’s or AI’s) from
Economics and Government in Fall Semester. The HR
and Course Enrollment cubes can be used to look at
trending information.
  compare number FTE’s of TA’s and AI’s across years
(resources used)
  compare semester credit hour production/ #sections /
enrollment across years
(productivity)
Business Scenario 2 – Course Planning
During course planning, each college must plan how
many sections of courses to offer each semester.
The academic affairs deans want to be able to analyze
what majors from other colleges are taking courses
within their colleges.
Business Scenario 3 - KPI
One of our key performance indicators monitored by the
Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board is the
number of undergraduate semester credit hours taught
by tenured or tenure-track faculty.
Our Provost wants to compare across colleges and time.
The course enrollment cube allows visual comparisons,
plus drill-downs to ask questions about courses taught
by non-tenured faculty – what classifications of
instructors are being used? what kinds of courses fall
into this category?
How Did We Do This?
Executive Sponsors, Steering Committee,
Stewardship Committee
Project Director
Project Manager
10 Full-time Analysts (grown from 3)
Key Personnel: Data Architect, Oracle DBA,
Liaison between IT/Business Users
Cognos Products
  Series 7.3 MR2
  Powerplay
  IWR
  NoticeCast
  Cognos ReportNet 1.1 (new)
  Cognos Planning Analyst
(new)
Key Principles
Absolute necessities:
  Build relationships
  Identify primary customers to serve
  Manage expectations…”Crawl, Walk, Run”
  Data Stewards must own responsibility for accurate
data, and perform extensive data cleansing
  Train and retrain (if necessary) to ensure highest ROI
Key Principles - Continued
Important for us:
  Meet grassroots (College level) needs first and needs of
central administration second.
  Fund project centrally.
  Start with steward area (in our case Financials) that is
ready and willing to invest
Key Principles - Continued
Constant involvement
of assistant/associate
deans and VP’s
in all phases
Business users trained on
OLAP multi-dimensional
concepts and design to do
requirements analysis.
ROI – A Few Benefits so far…
1.  More strategic decision-making (VWR Example)
2.  More reliable legacy systems
3.  Better and quicker information resulting in more
collaborative/trusting relationships with
constituents
Time Spent in Decision-Making
Analyze & Interpret
Consider Options
Data
Gathering
BEFORE
Information Gathering
Analyze
Consider
Options
AFTER
ROI: Time Saved in Report Preparation of AFR
Annual Financial Report: 705 Hours Less
(partial timesheet captured here)
Early Success Story: College of Engineering
“I was able to put together the financial part of our college’s
6 year accreditation survey in 1 ½ days with our Cognos financial cube, as opposed to
several months the last accreditation cycle. And I was able to give our dean a
special report that he needed
on the spot (in 15 minutes) just
the other day.” Cindy Brown, Assistant Dean
Next Challenges:
More complex business questions
Cost of Instruction
Time to Degree
More Sophisticated Revenue Forecasting
Faculty Profiles (IBM/Cognos Pilot Project)
Next Challenges:
Questions?
fred.friedrich@austin.utexas.edu
cathy.lester@austin.utexas.edu