Ithaca College

You do not hear loud sounds of drilling.  You do not see a tall crane lifting steel beams.  But Ithaca College is building a big Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) in the cloud through Amazon Web Services (AWS) RedShift in collaboration with HelioCampus!

The construction of our EDW began in June of this year under the joint leadership of Gerard Turbide (Vice President-Enrollment Management), Dave Weil (Chief Information Officer), and Yuko Mulugetta (Chief Analytics Officer).  This project is one of the core strategic initiatives to provide the foundation for Ithaca College to foster a data-informed decision making culture and to become a truly student-centered residential college.

We have been making great progress, and the first phase of the project is on schedule – special thanks to Nick Farthing (HelioCampus EDW Project Manager) and the hard work of the following offices: 

Admission (Tom Bloss and Mike Di Brienza)
Advancement Services (Benjamin Costello and Julie Andrews)
Analytics and Institutional Research (Claire Borch, Cole Gruberth, Peggy McKernan and Elijah Earl)
HR (Matt Lewkowicz)
IT: Engagement and Client Technologies (Bill Liddick)
IT: Applications and Infrastructure (Casey Kendall, Victor Kuraszewicz, Angel Gavidia, Chuck Cornwall, Jeff LeMay, Dale Riegle and Mark Yowan)
IT: Business Intelligence (Vanessa Brown and Jose Castro)
IT: Security (Jason Youngers and Seamus Enright)
Registrar (Vikki Levine and Tinita Wheaton)
Student Financial Services (Lisa Hoskey and Jill Moreland)

Why do we need an Enterprise Data Warehouse?  The current ODS (Operational Data Store) cannot integrate functional data streams effectively to answer questions essential to better understand students behaviors, support student success, and improve institutional outcomes.

The current ODS also cannot time stamp data to allow smooth longitudinal comparisons, for example, the accumulated financial aid expenditures of one day compared to those of previous years on that same date. 

HelioCampus EDW directly addresses these issues and introduces an extensible, high performance data platform with models and dashboards tailored to our needs.  It creates an enterprise data warehouse leveraging a star schema architecture, and integrates admission, enrollment, student success and financial data not only for operational reporting, but for advanced strategic analytics.

In collaboration with our IT team, HelioCampus has already established a secure, virtual private cloud (VPC) for Ithaca College where data from our systems is replicated and connected with analytical models and dashboards in the Amazon Web Services cloud.  HelioCampus has also completed stakeholders’ interviews and a business procedures review to ensure that the models and dashboards meet the unique needs of Ithaca College.

A progress report will be published again before the end of the fall semester.  Please let Dr. Yuko Mulugetta (Chief Analytics Officer, Office of Analytics and Institutional Research) know at ymulugetta@ithaca.edu if you have any questions related to HelioCampus EDW project.

Contributed on behalf of Dr. Yuko Mulugetta, Chief Analytics Officer.