The Computerworld Honors Program
Honoring those who use Information Technology to benefit society
LOCATION:
Fort Belvoir, VA, US

YEAR:
2007

STATUS:
Laureate

CATEGORY:
Education and Academia

NOMINATING COMPANY:
Informatica

ORGANIZATION:
Defense Acquisition University

PROJECT NAME:
DAU Data Mart

Short Summary
Graduating 114,000 students annually, the five-campus Defense Acquisition University (DAU) is dedicated to the ongoing professional education and career management of the Department of Defense’s global Acquisition, Technology and Logistics workforce, both military and civilian. With its distributed classroom training (including in the field in Iraq and Afghanistan) and global e-learning environment, the DAU is a vital link for ensuring that a fully trained and qualified workforce is in place to make smart business decisions and provide for the needs of US war fighters around the world. Facing the same challenges of higher education institutions worldwide—i.e.: optimizing use of funds, maximizing educational results—the DAU has launched an ambitious program to leverage student, employee and finance data across more than 50 disconnected sources to help drive accountability and positive educational outcomes.

The program hinges on a university-wide data integration and visibility environment that fuses data from defense finance accounting, budgeting, time-management, payroll, professor-certification, and defense training and resources systems—and presents it on demand to administrators, instructors and staff via easy-to-understand dashboard views and reports (e.g.: faculty reports on class success and professional development; management reports on class costs, and graduation/attrition rates).

Results have included:
• Rapid time-to-analysis and decreased operating costs—On-demand access to consolidated information has enabled DAU personnel to collectively save three to five man years of time and apply it to doing something more productive than merely collecting raw data.
• More effective apportionment and use of funds—Visibility into total class costs, teacher certifications, and graduation and attrition rates, and other performance metrics has enabled the DAU to sharpen its ability to provide effective and meaningful services to the defense community.
• Increased student performance on the job—Enhanced training and career-long education capabilities is helping to yield higher performing practitioners in the field.

Introductory Overview
The goal of the DAU project was to integrate multiple disparate data sources internal and external to the DAU in order to streamline the collection and analysis of information and provide visibility into the institution’s operational, financial and educational performance. The DAU utilizes numerous disparate legacy and mainframe systems including a custom-built mainframe application for defense finance accounting, a budgeting software package on a relational database, a time-management system, the defense civilian pay system, a professor-certification database, the US Army training requirements and resources system, as well as a third-party system that tracks survey data on teacher performance from all graduating students. Aggregating information across these different sources for reporting, planning and budgeting was an ongoing nightmare. For example, finance people could only see actuals from the DoD’s centralized accounting system, and with automated forecast budgeting on another system altogether, it was difficult to match up data across the two systems from one project code to another. A monthly reporting cycle would literally take all month—as soon as the data was collected and analyzed, it was time to start all over. Reports were not repeatable and generally provided no hints to how they were compiled. Personnel spent 90% of their time collecting data and only 10% of their time analyzing it, with little time to tell management what the data actually meant. The DAU wanted to turn this ratio on its head in order to save valuable time, drive better decisions, understand why things are happening, and gain actionable insights that would empower personnel to impact the future of how they and the DAU did business.

As only one relatively small business entity within DoD, the DAU does not have direct control over the data configuration of some key core systems such as the accounting system and personnel and payroll data. Therefore it has taken the approach to integrate these disparate data sources into a repository where it would be able to create DAU’s business taxonomy, business rules, and create a structure for the data that more directly maps to the university’s mission.

The project hinged on integrating and standardizing the data and providing access to historical and well as raw data, and delivering the information on demand via comprehensive dashboard views and repeatable (“measure once, use often”) reports. The DAU selected the Informatica PowerCenter data integration platform as the cornerstone for its data warehousing and reporting project and the university’s administrators and faculty are now using the software to better track and analyze its key performance metrics. PowerCenter consolidates student, employee and finance data from 50 sources, including mainframes, into the DAU’s central data warehouse, accessed by personnel via an Informatica-enabled information dashboard and generating more than 2,400 reports that touch practically everyone in the university.

The project has successfully standardized and linked multiple diverse data sets, established internal controls to ensure reliability of the data (“one version of the truth”) and provided real-time on-line access to the DAU leadership team to assist in expanding its understanding of business performance and enable decisions to be enacted more quickly. Instead of going from system to system to compile data and track operations, required information now exists in reusable reports while the context of the data is kept intact so that people reusing it know exactly what they are looking at. Flexibility to address change exists in the data architecture and repository, which were designed to maximize scalability and adaptability. This enables quick response to shifting priorities and enables the DAU to redirect its business measurement system quickly without losing the integrity of historical data comparisons.

Benefits
Has your project helped those it was designed to help?   Yes

What new advantage or opportunity does your project provide to people?
The biggest new advantages are better use of time and enhanced visibility. Now that key reports are automated, what used to take days to compile (hopefully, with due accuracy and completeness) are now delivered on demand with ensured accuracy and completeness. The query is there already, waiting to be launched by accounting people, class schedulers, instructors, etc. As for visibility, instructors receive a report on the success of each class, as well as on their professional development status. The report shows how well the instructor is spanning the university’s learning model, and how well they’ve taught the students (with data integrated in from a third-party student survey management system) for 360 degrees of feedback. Managers, meanwhile, receive reports on class costs, teacher certifications, employee time accounting, and annual leave status of staffers, as well as reports on graduation and attrition rates. The system also provides performance support for instructors consulting to various other government agencies, depicting monthly how they’ve spent their time year-to-date. And it delivers reports to large government contractors on which of their employees have taken DAU courses and how they are progressing in its training programs.

DAU management decisions are based on hard data delivered in real time to the decision makers. People see at a glance, exactly when they need to see it, the precise information they need to improve their own performance and the performance of the university as a whole. Very significantly, in the past, data owners did not necessarily or eagerly share their information—it was too hard won to begin with. In making more information more accessible to more people, the new system has changed DAU’s culture to a more open and transparent one, while eliminating the paradigm of having to “pull teeth” to get to desired data on time.

Has your project fundamentally changed how tasks are performed?   Yes

How do you see your project's innovation benefiting other applications, organizations, or global communities?
Data integration initiatives of this scale and complexity, involving both inter- and cross-enterprise integration and touching virtually everyone in the larger organization, are very rare in education and much rarer still in government. Educational institutions and government agencies can all benefit from this type of application, which promotes accountability, increased business efficiency, improved educational performance (in the case of universities and school systems), and optimal use of public funds.

DAU’s innovative program of providing data integration and visibility environment that fuses data from defense finance accounting, budgeting, time-management, payroll, professor-certification, and defense training and resources systems—and presents it on demand to administrators, instructors and staff via easy-to-understand dashboard views and reports—has allowed the DAU to do more with less and the results have contributed to the university being recognized as: Best Overall Corporate University during the 2006 Corporate University Best in Class Awards; 2004 Top Corporate University in the World, ASTD Best Award; 2004 CLO Magazine Learning in Practice Awards; 2004 Training Top 100; 2003 CUX Excellence Awards; 2002 Corporate University Best-in-Class Awards; and others. The DAU’s innovative business models and performance based budgeting are now being emulated throughout the Department of Defense.

The Importance of Technology
How did the technology you used contribute to this project and why was it important?
The data integration challenge at the DAU is formidable. Systems are both old and new, on-premise and off, relational and legacy, etc. The use of a modern data integration platform, PowerCenter, to automatically pull out data and transform and integrate it for a wide range of end user purposes has been paramount to the success of DAU’s project—providing the ability to access both structured data from relational sources and unstructured data from mainframes and spreadsheets and meld it. Ways that DAU has benefited from this technology include:

• User Productivity and information completeness and accuracy—Previously, DAU personnel had to go to multiple different systems to track, say, the total cost of a specific item from both a labor and non-labor standpoint. Data had to be pulled out and scripts used to integrate the data or else spreadsheet-like hand-mapping was used. It was a colossal time investment, with no repeatability, no scalability, and little context or no around the data that was ultimately presented. The use of an automated data integration platform offering universal data access has radically changed all this, delivering aggregated, formatted information in a scalable and high performance fashion to the data warehouse and users, with the additional ability to deliver it to other applications and portals. Control is also built into the system—as soon as someone accesses a record, it is detected.
• Faster time-to-insight—With the data integration platform automatically transforming and mapping data from multiple disparate sources to one workflow, fully contextual information is now delivered orders of magnitude faster—in fact, information that previously was unable to be used because of technical barriers is now available on demand and is helping to drive more timely and meaningful decisions. In addition, the information dashboard powered by the data integration platform is easy enough for people with no background or experience in business intelligence to use.
• Rapid implementation—In addition, now in place, the data integration platform can be leveraged to accelerate the implementation of additional systems and bring them into the DAU’s reporting and analysis fold. For example, a contractor had been working to implement a new HR system for the DAU for two years, but was hampered by the mapping of data from multiple sources. But when the PowerCenter platform was leveraged for the purpose, the new HR system was able to be “stood up” in just six weeks, with all the legacy data sources mapped appropriately to the new system.

This integrated performance, cost, quality, and other data provide leadership with real-time visibility to better manage the university.
The seamless linkage of time accounting, budgeting, cost accounting, and performance measurement tools allows DAU to efficiently operate using best in class commercial business practices. The DAU now has the capability to smartly apply its resources in alignment with its plans and measure success against quantitative results. Deployment has been an enterprise-wide effort and has impacted the entire university and how it provides learning products and services in the most efficient and effective means.

Originality
What are the exceptional aspects of your project?
• Complexity of information environment and diversity of data sources—50 sources spanning off-premise mainframes to local databases to flat file sources.
• Breadth of users and people who benefit—Virtually the entire university staff including instructors, schedulers and administrators, as well as defense contractors whose employees take course and other agencies. The university’s tens of thousands of students also benefit from the impact the system has on enhancing the performance of their instructors. The ultimate beneficiaries are the hundreds of thousands of US war fighters served by the DAU-educated, DoD global Acquisition, Technology and Logistics workforce.
• Empowerment of users—Non-technical users are hardly used to being empowered to get desired information on demand, especially in academic environments. Now, instead of calling accounting and waiting for weeks for answers, they are empowered to query for themselves and get answers derived from data spread across dozens of different sources.
• Agility—New data sources providing answers to new types of questions are quickly integrated into the system, with the raw data often mapped into existing dimensions in the data warehouse.
• Visibility and accountability—The DAU now has the capability to smartly apply its resources in alignment with its plans and measure success against quantitative results. For example, the project supports an automated enterprise-wide Performance Management and Business Infrastructure, where progress toward meeting strategic goals is measured and reported regularly. The system sets baselines, tracks progress, manages tasks, and analyzes results. It is available to all managers to track performance in regard to quality of DAU products and services and the efficiency of DAU operations. Additionally, managers have real-time visibility of their tasks and the tasks of their subordinates.

How is it original?
The DAU project is relatively new in the governmental sphere—i.e.: aggregating data from multiple, disparate data sources (often data that has gone unused) and using it to make better managers of people in government. Additionally, it is original in providing valuable information out to industry entities such as contractors with people taking DAU courses. Through this sharing of data, the DAU is creating genuine partnerships with industry to better serve their respective stakeholders.

DAU’s innovative program has allowed smart investment in best practices resulting in huge productivity and efficiency increases across the enterprise, such as: graduates are up 188 % (from 39,700 in FY99 to over 113,000 graduates in FY06), online graduates increased by 790% (from 8,800 in FY99 to 75,079 per year in FY06); on-line instruction time has increased to over 3.3 million hours in 2006; continuous Learning module completions have grown steadily with 168,463 completions in 2006; knowledge sharing assets now provide for 420,000 contact hours; 2,350,800 page views per month usage, 355,654 contact hours logged on communities of practice; 377 collaborative workspaces utilized. Astoundingly, this equates to over 1,600,000 hours of new learning assets provided to DAU customers – and with no increase in the annual training budget. The DAU has also established strategic partnerships with over 95 organizations. The global reach of DAU’s learning and development capability permeates its extended enterprise—learning and development assets reach the workforce world-wide, 24/7 in 116 countries, at their point of need.

DAU’s innovative business models and performance based budgeting are now being emulated throughout the Department of Defense.

Is it the first, the only, the best or the most effective application of its kind?   All of the above

Success
Has your project achieved or exceeded its goals?   Exceeded

Is it fully operational?   Yes

How many people benefit from it?   113000

If possible, include an example of how the project has benefited a specific individual, enterprise or organization. Please include personal quotes from individuals who have directly benefited from your work.
The approximately 1,000 users, as well as the more than 113,000 DAU graduates each year.

The DAU project has essentially made it easier for people to not only do their jobs, but to improve their performance and the performance of the DAU as a whole, while enhancing accountability to the DoD, contractors, and students.

For example:

“I know I've used the term "hit the ball out of the park" too many times over the past couple of weeks describing what you've done with the datamart's AAP Portal, but I can't tell you how much I appreciate your team efforts to pull this project off for today's EPRA. I think it's fair to say that we got the deans' collective attention on AAP stats this morning, which will go a LONG way in garnering their participation and buy-in for any workflow process improvements I'm able to implement this year.” – From a Project Manager in the DAU’s e-Learning & Technologies Center

“This is awesome. This is just what our leadership needs to provide visibility into the health of the administration of our program. I would like to get this dashboard on a bi-weekly basis; 1st and 15th of each calendar month will due fine. These metrics must also be available in a .ppt compatible format (if possible). Job well done and keep'em comin!” – From a user in the DAWIA Program Office, Defense Intelligence Agency

“I can quickly run and confirm MTM data by quarter, by campus; when I pulled this information direct from MTM for last quarter's EPRA review, it took almost 6 hours. I am confident now that I can get the same data for this quarter's EPRA in about 10 to 15 minutes.” – From a DAU Course Manager

How quickly has your targeted audience of users embraced your innovation? Or, how rapidly do you predict they will?
There was immediate acceptance as users saw the advantages. Now people are literally beating down the door to leverage the new system. All over the university, the information stove pipes have been falling. “Get my information into the data warehouse, please.” “Take my Access database, please.”

Difficulty
What were the most important obstacles that had to be overcome in order for your work to be successful? Technical problems? Resources? Expertise? Organizational problems?
There were some obstacles to overcome at first. Not least of which was getting access to data, especially in systems outside direct DAU control such as defense civilian payroll and defense finance accounting. It was necessary to get buy-in from the owners of these systems and some convincing was necessary regarding resource commitments. Top management at the DAU was behind the project from the start, that was covered.

There was also the hurdle of having people with little or no expertise in automated business intelligence. People needed to be trained to filter data and build reports and get them to understand the full power of the tool.

Organizationally and culturally, many people look at their data as their job. Hence there was reluctance to sharing certain pockets of data. But as senior management wanted this, and once the benefits were revealed, the barriers fell. Now the culture is: “I have this particular data, can you load it in?”


Often the most innovative projects encounter the greatest resistance when they are originally proposed. If you had to fight for approval or funding, please provide a summary of the objections you faced and how you overcame them.
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