After three years of behind-the-scenes work, the UM-Dearborn campus’s enterprise reporting system has been successfully transitioned to a better, more sustainable platform, without downtime for their customers.
The UM-Dearborn Information Technology Services team made the switch to BusinessObjects in June to save on licensing costs and consolidate infrastructure. This move also allows the group to decommission the on-premise servers and infrastructure of the old platform, Webfocus.
“Moving to BusinessObjects allowed us to have a common place to start for the source of truth,” said Rick Michalski, director of Institutional Research and Effectiveness for UM-Dearborn. “We can more easily get the data requestors actually want and need, faster.”
By making the move, the university now has cloud access to the data. BusinessObjects allows for more functionality for users while simplifying how they get reports. Michalski was excited about the standardization and templates, including a standard set of launch pages.
“We get a lot of one-off requests for data,” he said, “Now it’s simpler to fill those and build the trust in the data. We have more than 400 reports available in BusinessObjects so far.”
Brian LaGoe, director of Applications for UM-Dearborn ITS, said this project wouldn’t have been possible without the collaboration between the Dearborn and UM-Ann Arbor campuses.
“By working together, we could broadly share our knowledge,” he said, “The support Ann Arbor has given us has been great. And we’re grateful we could do this without an increase to cost. The savings are significant.”
This collaboration benefits both campuses. Through sharing lessons learned, an inter-campus knowledge base is growing to help all users solve their issues faster.
For more information about BusinessObjects at UM-Dearborn, visit the Institutional Research and Effectiveness website.
