History In 1994, Penn State embarked on a project to make ad hoc access to institutional data easier, more flexible and more widely available to the University community. The Data Warehouse—with its original aim to unlock the data from the mainframe environment, making it accessible from the desktop—has now become the source for a system of  “data marts," or subsets of data oriented to various business areas. Also in the early nineties, the University created the Enterprise Information System (EIS); a tool for answering questions about enrollments, admissions and other Penn State-related information. EIS allows for the convenient viewing of summary-level data through a Web browser where it can instantly be presented in spreadsheet, chart or graph format. The Data Warehouse and EIS have proven to be extremely valuable to the Penn State community.  Both systems have a wide user base and play a key role at making institutional information more easily available to the university community.  However, both systems are now more than ten years old, and Penn State’s information needs as well as technology have changed significantly since EIS and the Data Warehouse were first developed.  Even though EIS and the Data Warehouse continue to fulfill their purpose, Penn State’s needs for information have expanded to include capabilities not supported by either of the tools. The purpose of the Business Intelligence initiative is to re-assess Penn State’s current information needs and then to work cooperatively with the University Community to plan, design, develop and implement an infrastructure that will transform administrative data into information and that will make the right information available to right Penn State stakeholder at the right time and in the right delivery media. As the initial step of the Business Intelligence (BI) initiative, Penn State commissioned Software AG's Business Solution Consulting Group to perform an assessment of Penn State's Business Intelligence capabilities.  During the assessment process, the Software AG (SAG) team evaluated Penn State's current business intelligence efficacy by conducting stakeholder interviews, analyzing data repositories, data usage, and user needs to recommend potential steps and solutions that will enhance Penn State's business intelligence capabilities.  SoftwareAG's Business Intelligence Report

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