Mary Lee Moore, Coordinator of Research and Administrative Services, for the Pennsylvania Transportation Institute, will soon be implementing use of the IBIS financial data in the warehouse to better manage the more than 195 research accounts and projects in her area.

"We need to be able to handle the reporting demands of the state and federal agencies we deal with; all of whom want slightly different reports. The warehouse allows us the flexibility to meet these constantly changing demands."

Rhonda Brown, administrative assistant in the Telecommunications and Networking Services , currently spends one day a month creating monthly financial analysis reports. Now by accessing data in the warehouse she will be able to generate the same reports in an hour.

"The warehouse will give me the ability to quickly and efficiently analyze our financial data."

Patricia Cochrane, Continuing and Distance Education, commented:

"The data warehouse has been especially helpful to us in C&DE for gathering information on credit offerings available through Continuing and Distance Education throughout the Penn State system. Previously, this information was obtained through telephone calls to campuses and UP locations and taking days sometimes to complete. Now, thanks to warehouse access, it is a matter of querying various tables with appropriate location and delivery codes and we have available to us enrollments and course counts for continuing education credit offerings."  

Ginger Breon, Smeal College of Business Administration:

"I can't say enough about the benefits of the Data Warehouse for our College. I have used the student data on the warehouse to provide the Deans with information for strategic planning, comparative analysis, and other special reports. It is amazing how much easier it is to retrieve and manipulate the data I need from the system for extensive analysis. The hardest part of using the Warehouse is getting to know the data, however that would be true no matter what methods you used to access data because that knowledge comes from working with it."

Thomas Streveler, Penn State Harrisburg, Capital College:

"The resources of the Data Warehouse have helped me almost on a daily basis. Since my job combines admissions and academic records, I get many questions that overlap the two areas. I don't know how I could meet the needs for information without the great flexibility that the warehouse provides. There are things that I simply could not have done, or would have had to take days to do, that I can now do quickly through the warehouse. I use the warehouse to answer special cases that require information that is usually not readily available anywhere else."

Glen Kreider, College of Liberal Arts

I've been doing a modest amount of warehousing in recent months, mainly in connection with strategic planning and support for departmental operations.

Just a few observations:
The productivity gains associated with data warehouse use have been quite substantial -- and most welcome. Before, just getting the right data was such a hassle and so time-consuming. Now, I am able to spend much more of my time organizing and interpreting the results and on data integrity issues, rather than wrestling with the (sometimes) arcane details of programming languages and mainframe systems.

For many of us, the quest for institutional data is only an occasional pursuit. Therefore, ease of access is extremely important - even for programmers! While there remains room for improvement in this regard, institutional data is far, far more accessible through the data warehouse than from its ancestral systems. That's good news for those of us who would prefer to spend our time seeking solutions to real problems, rather than jousting with computing systems.