Business Intelligence Competency Center Information Technology

What We Do

The Business Intelligence Competency Center (BICC) is part of Purdue IT and serves as the central hub equipping Purdue’s information producers with data, tools, services, and expertise. We are helping build an effective and efficient BI community, so together we can empower Purdue’s decision makers and staff with high quality information.

  • Data: The BICC builds and maintains Purdue’s enterprise data warehouse environments that include data from enterprise systems like Banner and SAP. This includes Data Marts for our business units, and the Student ODS/EDW for Student data. We’re in the process of transinging the Student ODS/EDW into datamarts and continuing to add new sources of data as well. See the Projects & Enhancements page for more information about what we’re working on.

  • Tools: Information producers at Purdue use a variety of different tools. At the enterprise level, the BICC supports the IBM Cognos suite of reporting and query tools and the Tableau toolset for visual analysis and dashboards.

  • Services: Navigating the various data resources and BI tools can be a daunting task, and the BICC is here to help. We offer Cognos Training to help users get up to speed in using our enterprise reporting tool, and aim to provide documentations to help explain the data landscape, resources on the enterprise data visualization tool in Tableau, and insights into the key players and frequent terminology used in the data community. 

  • Expertise: Data is our business, and we’re working hard with the BI Community to advance the state of Business Intelligence at Purdue. We’re helping define and implement strategy though the various BI governance groups, and spearheading initiatives like the Dashboard Proof of Concept which resulted in the purchase of Tableau.

Who does what?

Given the distributed model for BI we have at Purdue, people often ask us who does what and how it fits together.

While we work to build out the data warehouse environment and support tools, we work with may partners across the university to ensure they have what they need to build reports and dashboards and solve other data needs for their areas. Here are some of our primary partners:

  • Administrative Operations
  • Card Services
  • Enrollment Management Analysis & Reporting
  • Financial Planning & Analysis
  • Human Resources
  • Institutional Data Analytics + Assessment
  • Purdue IT
  • Sponsored Program Services
  • Student Life

Where are we heading?

The BICC is working with our Governance groups and the BI Community to create a future state for BI at Purdue where:

our distributed information producers work together as a community to make information delivery seamless to our decision makers and staff, empowered by a full set of enterprise BI tools and a single, integrated source of enterprise data

People

Increased engagement between the BICC and our partners with improved data training and expertise development.

Process

Simplify business processes, eliminate data silos while improving data completness, set up frameworks to bring value through data governance, and ensure data access to prevent further siloing of data.

Technology

Improve data assets using aggregated and simplified data sets for more effecient reporting on key items while keeping our tools available simple and complete to satisfy all data needs with the fewest tools possible.