Student DSS Data Warehouse Project
A significant undertaking to map departmental codes used by Accounting Services to program majors was completed in 2001. A total of 2803 program majors at West Lafayette, Technology Statewide, Fort Wayne, Calumet, and North Central, were mapped to departmental codes. The need for mapping active program major codes system-wide was identified by Budget and Fiscal Planning to facilitate reporting student information with personnel and financial data. Lists of programs active over the previous five years were prepared and initial mapping completed by the Data Steward. Departmental schedule deputies were asked to validate the mapping. The registrars from the other Purdue University campuses were asked to determine the appropriate departmental code for programs offered at their campuses. Information Technology modified data entry screens to accommodate the departmental codes. The data were batched to the Program of Study file and Student DSS was populated with this information in fall 2001.

The University's Strategic Plan and the identification of benchmark data for comparisons with peer institutions have identified the need for additional data fields that will be added to Student DSS in 2002. These include national merit data and the Indiana regional top scholar (IRTS) award data. It is anticipated that Student DSS increasingly will be a resource for departments, schools, and campuses in the preparation of reports that will support the University's benchmark comparisons with peer institutions.

Direct Student E-Mail
An annual review of the guidelines for Direct Student E-Mail was completed in May 2001 with only minor changes to the initial document; however, the document was formatted and organized on the Web for greater ease of use. The Guidelines may be found at the following site: http://www.purdue.edu/VPSS/DSE/dsehm.htm (no longer available)

An electronic form to submit an on-line request for direct student e-mail was completed with assistance from staff at Engineering Computing Network (ECN). The form requires a career account login and password by the staff member that enables staff in the Office of the Registrar to verify the source of the request. The form provides an easy, immediate opportunity for staff to make Direct Student E-Mail requests.

During the past year it was found that the staff responsible for receiving and managing a distributed list for his/her advising area varied in their technical skills. As a result, a set of instructions for downloading the file, manipulating the information, and using the e-mail address in a mail package. Collaborating with staff in Staff Computer Training (SCT), these instructions were placed on the SCT web site along with their FTP instructions. Links pointing to these instructions were inserted in the Distributed Lists instructions found on the Student Services Computing page. Currently, 16 advising offices receive electronic files of students registered in their schools or majors on a bi-weekly basis

Purdue Unique Identifier Project (PUID)
Efforts continued for coordinating staff in central student services offices for managing PUID assignment. Although staff members were identified in the Office of Admissions, Graduate School, Office of the Registrar, and International Students and Scholars, training for resolving records held "in suspense" was needed. This fall two training sessions were conducted and documented business rules were drafted to assist staff charged with managing the Suspense list.

Recognizing that the PUID is a valuable public identifier that has potential for numerous applications, drafts of a Service Level Agreement (SLA) and the remaining business and technical needs for PUID were written. Both the SLA and the list of unfinished business and technical items were shared with IT staff and the PUID project manager, underscoring the need to take the PUID project forward to completion.

In the fall, the PUID was placed on the Purdue Electronic Directory, which led to several questions about the PUID and its intended use. A list of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) was created and placed on the Student Services Computing web site at http://www.purdue.edu/ssta/ns.htm.

SAS Share Project
The SAS Share project, sponsored by the Data Stewards, was proposed as a temporary means of access to operational data until operational data stores are be built. Although the Student data warehouse (DSS) contains a significant amount of data, it is not an operational data store. In addition, needs were identified for data not currently available in Student DSS. These include up-to-date course schedule information, previous college data, and undergraduate application data.

Currently four SAS/Share datasets of student data were built. These include the program of study (POS), the student schedule file (RESS), the student information file (SI), and the degree file (DEGREERP). The advantage of the datasets is that each dataset is re-created each evening following batch processing. Because the SAS/Share project was intended to be a temporary solution, resource required to develop star-join models was not provided. University personnel with access to the datasets are expected to build their own joins. This ability requires knowledge of the data as well as knowledge of a query tool, such as Brio, Access, Excel, or SAS.

During the past year, efforts were completed to prepare metadata for every field within each of the SAS/Share datasets. Because the data were being "shared" outside the Office of the Registrar, detailed metadata was needed to support new users. Unlike Student DSS, no data translations are available in the datasets. Individual users will be heavily dependent on the metadata to determine the codes needed to prepare queries. In September, a demonstration of SAS/Share was given to 24 staff from 13 departments or offices at West Lafayette. Interest in the datasets was high and several requests for access were received following the demonstration.

Currently, 23 people have been issued SAS/Share accounts for access to data that heretofore had been accessible only by the Office of the Registrar technical staff. The rollout was planned only for current RJE users or Student DSS users who have data knowledge as well as the Brio query tool.

In preparation for formal training, 10 standard queries were developed in response to commonly asked questions involving the data. Training for new users was completed in May 2002.

PageCenter
During 2001 a plan was developed to move 500 reports from the PUBALL application in PageCenter to applications created around logical groupings. Initially, public reports formerly stored on Administrative Report Access (ARA) were set up in a public application, called PUBALL, for any staff member with Top Secret access. However, the application soon became so large that the ability for the campus community to locate reports became unwieldy. The vision was to create four new applications that would group common reports for admission, scheduling, enrollment, and academic performance, while keeping some reports in PUBALL. The project had approval from the Data Stewards, Student Services offices, and Information Technology by the middle of the fall semester. The migration of reports began in the spring of 2002 as a collaborative effort between the Data Steward and Information Technology. At year's end, all reports pertaining to academic performance have been migrated. Work is in progress to migrate admissions reports. The effort is resource-intensive since each report and its history must be moved individually. Currently, two FTE are dedicated 8 hours each week to work on the project.

Phases I and II of the PageCenter project were completed in previous years. These phases included replacing microfiche reports and ARA as the application for accessing public, summary reports. Phase III of the PageCenter project centers on reducing or eliminating the printing of reports generated from nightly processing. In 2001, a collaborative effort between the Office of the Registrar, Information Technology, and Student Services was initiated to identify mainframe reports that would be candidates for PageCenter. At year's end, more than a dozen reports were made placed on PageCenter with a discontinuance of printing. Additional printed outputs were identified as candidates but will require program modifications (form 100) to create files that will group data together for routing to PageCenter. Many of these reports are large, resulting in hundreds of printed pages. Staging the outputs in files will enable indexing them to allow users the ability to quickly find only those pages in which they need.

A shared effort between Business Services, Student Services, and Information Technology to develop a formal training class on the PageCenter application was initiated in 2001. Feedback received on the PageCenter application pointed to the need to offer formal training in a traditional classroom environment. A training mailbox with reports, training accounts, and a training manual were developed by this group. A class was piloted in May 2002 and monthly classes are scheduled through December 2002.

Student Information Data Integration
With the integration of employee data in SIS, issues arose pertinent to ownership of name, name changes, SID number and date of birth data. Similar to Student business processes, Personnel Services has formal procedures for changing any demographic information. Integrating data from multiple sources has resulted in errors that must be resolved by staff in central offices, similar to PUID suspense management. Staff must determine whether the duplicate records should be merged because the people are the same or not. Lead by the Data Steward, a group of Student Services staff was identified to manage duplicate record resolution. The group met to establish the business rules for resolving the duplicate records and documentation, originally developed by Admissions, was broadened. A majordomo list was created as a means of providing a communication path between the staff across offices involved in resolving the record collisions that cut across offices.

Currently, data integration continues to cause errors in transactions due to differences in how name and SID are recorded in the different systems.

Access Control for Student Information Systems
The purpose of this project is to define the procedures for requesting and granting access to data in the Student Information System (SIS). A project charter was written and approved by the Trax Stewards in late fall 2001. Representatives from the Student Services areas were identified and a committee chaired by the Data Steward began to meet in early February 2002.

To date, procedures for requesting access to SIS are in place. The procedures and the access form can be found at the following web location (link no longer available).

Work is in progress on a review of draft procedures and a form for requesting and granting access to query the developing ODS.

Procedures for disabling and terminating accounts after 60 or 90 consecutive days of inactivity were established along with a process for re-activating accounts. These procedures are found at (link no longer available) under "Re-activating an SIS account."

Currently, over 400 active production accounts in SIS have been requested and approved. Many of the requests enable University staff to record information about prospective students, provide academic advisors to view information seen by their students through SSINFO, manage space for meetings, classrooms or other events, and manage the University's course master information.

There are over 60 active accounts issued for running queries in the production Student Information Query (SIQ) system. While many are using the current data models, other models are being built and more are being planned as additional functionality is added to the SIS system.

Meetings Attended
Indiana Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers 2000 Annual Meeting, Toledo, Ohio.

Data Stewards
Each month the data stewards from each business area (student, human resources, financial, space, housing, access card, development) meet to exchange information about their respective area of responsibility. In addition there is an opportunity to be apprised of new initiatives from the Department of Management Information and to reflect on those initiatives.

A major project undertaken by the Data Stewards as part of the Management Information Security Project was the development of a process for classifying the data and information at the University. The computing managers approved the Stewards' recommendation for how to classify data in each business. The data stewards were then assigned the task of classifying the data in each of their respective business areas. The goal was to complete this task by the end of June 2000. The final draft was completed in April 2001. Implementation of the classification system rules previously agreed upon has provided new insights on how to classify data and information. Adjustments need to be made to make the classification system manageable. The classification system will not be useful unless it is easy to use and easy to understand. Otherwise it will just be more web space fodder.