Business intelligence software development services

Tender description

The university has purchased a single Business Information tool that will enable the development of business information reporting against a broader range of institutional indicators that are easily accessible by those that need them. The project deployment will take a phased approach. Phase 1 will incorporate the replacement of Oracle Discoverer Plus 10g linked to the SITS Student Record System and Cognos Impromptu linked to the CedAr finance system. The project must deliver the suite of kite marked reports/query's that currently support the Universities key business performance monitoring; the operational/audit reports used to maintain the data quality of the underlying database, and provide a user friendly interface to enable non-technical staff to respond to ad hoc requests within similar timescales to that currently achieved i.e. hours/days depending upon levels of complexity. These reports must be enhanced using the BI capabilities of the new tool, to enable university staff to use them to inform and aid the effective running of the University along with the ability to support strategic thinking. Ultimately the project must deliver this capability, in subsequent phases, using all of the defined core datasets of the institution. The University wishes to draw on external resources generally used by the sector such as Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) and marketing/commercial data to benchmark performance. The solution must therefore be able to aggregate data from a range of disparate data sources e.g. local databases, excel, Higher Education Information database for Institutions (HEIDI) into an easy to understand interactive visual display. It should be highly configurable and flexible to support numerous graphical representations that can be created and navigated by non-technical users.