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The University of Utah has a wealth of data about its students, faculty, staff, financials and other topics covering the breadth of its resources and operations. These data elements are a vital asset used by University leadership, state, and federal governing bodies to inform decisions about university programs, initiatives, budgets and operations.

The Office of Budget and Institutional Analysis (OBIA) is charged with bringing data together from multiple operational areas on campus to analyze and generate insights. We generate official information for University leadership, the Utah System of Higher Education (USHE), the U.S. Department of Education (IPEDS) and other external audiences. In addition, we provide ad hoc support to University divisions for a variety of data needs and dedicated analytics for partner colleges.

We coordinate with several offices on campus to understand the data they generate, improve data quality, and integrate the data into an institutional-level view of our academic resources and student outcomes.

PEOPLESOFT

The majority of data gathered by OBIA come from the U’s enterprise PeopleSoft databases:  Student (HE), Faculty/Staff (HR) and Finance (FS). Our direct reliance on PeopleSoft continues to go down as our two dedicated reporting environments grow up: OBIA’s reporting database and the institutional Student Data Warehouse.

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OBIA’s REPORTING DATABASE

This is used to generate official numbers reported to state and federal governing bodies and other aggregate reporting when requirements dictate data should align with official figures. Data is extracted from PeopleSoft and other source systems, checked for quality, and transformed into new structures that facilitate reporting. We enhance the data with standard definitions that meet external agency reporting guidelines and allow baseline comparisons between the University of Utah and peer institutions, and incorporate internal definitions that support institution-wide assessment and planning.

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STUDENT DATA WAREHOUSE

The Student Data Warehouse (SDW) is a collaboration across various offices on campus and provides information on students and class registration.  It is governed by a committee lead by the Registrar’s Office and maintained by UIT-Business Intelligence. With users across the academic colleges, the SDW allows access to institutional data for analytical and reporting purposes.