CAL PROFILES: U.C. Berkeley's Collaborative Effort to Facilitate Campus Access to Management Information

Abstract

Cal Profiles is an initiative to provide management information to the campus community using state of the art technology. What began as a survey of peer institutions' data warehouse efforts resulted in a Microsoft Access produced and web-distributed report containing data on resources, workload, performance indicators, outreach efforts, and inflation-adjusted financials for all campus units. This paper describes the experience: (1) working with central and local data sources in a variety of formats (e.g., flat files, excel spreadsheets, e-mail text and data warehouse information), (2) understanding, reviewing and correcting data from multiple sources, (3) mapping unlike data sources to one common structure, (4) importing, querying, and developing the Profiles in Access, and (5) working with local computing resources to develop a web-distribution tool using Cold Fusion. The authors discuss the process to obtain acceptance from campus leadership, data owners, and administrative and academic users and use of the web to communicate progress on the project. Finally, the authors describe how they plan to formalize this data administration and production effort.