The University of Aberdeen is a long-standing user of Seagate Software`s Holos business intelligence software. It has developed Seagate Holos-based applications for financial reporting, management of grants and contracts, and analysis of student information. At the moment, Seagate Holos is playing a key role in the university`s efforts to maintain and increase its income in the face of reduced funding from the UK government.
Founded in 1495, the University of Aberdeen is one of Scotland`s oldest universities. Today, it provides educational facilities for over 11,000 students representing nearly 100 nationalities. The university has been a Seagate Holos user since February 1993. Its first Seagate Holos-based application was designed to enable the university`s accountants to perform flexible analyses of financial data and produce monthly management reports.
"Our existing finance system was not capable of providing useful management information. It could not produce the statistics we really needed, and it was unable to summarise information in a way that would give us a high-level overview of our financial position," said Jerome Perera, corporate systems manager within the University of Aberdeen`s directorate of information systems and services.
Fundamental Requirements
In an attempt to find the best solution for its needs, the university evaluated several leading business intelligence tools. According to Perera, Seagate Holos was chosen because it met all the university`s requirements while at the same time appearing technically superior. For example, Seagate Holos was the only product capable of handling the multidimensional aspects of the data. This was a fundamental requirement for the university. In addition, Seagate Holos offered superior performance: for extracting data and end-user reporting, the response times were much faster than those of any other competitive product.
The original Seagate Holos-based financial application was used only within the finance department, with paper copies of the reports being distributed to administrators and other senior staff. In 1996, however, it was decided that the capabilities of the Seagate Holos system should be made available to a much wider range of users. This coincided with a change from the university`s old legacy finance system, written in Vista 4GL and running on Digital VMS, to a new UNIX-based package, Oracle Educational Systems (OES).
Currently, Seagate Holos is running on a dedicated UNIX-based Digital Alpha 300 server, with a 1Gb Oracle 7.3 database. Data to be analysed by the Holos applications is extracted every night from the Sequent 2000 machine on which OES and other applications run. However, this approach will soon be superseded by automatic replication, using a Digital Alpha 533 server with a 1Gb Oracle 8 database. A total of about 300 administrative and academic users currently have access to Seagate Holos.
Since 1996, developers at the university have created two new Holos-related applications. One is used for the financial management of individual grants and contracts, and the other for the analysis of information about students and their courses. All three applications are currently playing an important role in the university`s operations.
"The basic advantage of using Seagate Holos is that it provides the reports and management information we need. When we first chose the product, its ability to drill down through the data to any level was critical. This is still true today. Another major benefit is that Seagate Holos has the potential to integrate information from different operational systems on an ongoing basis. This kind of integration, and the information that results from it, is not achievable in any other way," said Perera.
Response Times Reduced Further
Perera reports that feedback from end-users has been very positive. Managers and others are getting the reports they need in a format that suits them, and the speed of response of the system is greatly appreciated. The university has been able to reduce response times even further by providing end-users with simplified data structures on which they can base many of their analyses.
Rae Davidson, systems accountant in the university`s finance department, confirms the exceptional ease-of-use of Seagate Holos. As an accountant, she found that once she had learned how to use Holos, development became exceptionally easy - easier, in fact, than with any other system she has used. Furthermore, she says that she need never spend more than 45 minutes teaching an end-user about the system.
"End-users don`t need any technical knowledge to use Seagate Holos. In most cases, a ten- or fifteen-minute training session will teach them all they need to know. Many academics appreciate the fact that the information can be downloaded into the kind of spreadsheet format that they are familiar with, allowing them to play around with the data. Most users are extremely enthusiastic," she commented.
Major Contribution to Funding
Davidson believes that the grants and contracts application is a particularly important one. It is making a major contribution to the university`s fight for money in the face of rapidly declining levels of funding from the UK government.
"Thanks to Seagate Holos, we now know exactly how much money we are getting from each funding organisation at any moment in time. In the past, the figures were only calculated once a year, and it was rather awkward to approach people for more money when we could not tell them how much we were already getting," she said.
"Furthermore, the European Union has recently become one of the biggest grant-awarding authorities. Grant applications to Brussels have to be accompanied by a mountain of information, and Seagate Holos allows us to supply that information. It is no coincidence that we are managing to increase our funding at a time when many others aren`t."
The university has recently installed Version 6.0 of Seagate Holos. As well as providing a significant performance increase due to its new Compound OLAP architecture, Version 6.0 is Web-enabled. This, according to Perera, will make applications accessible to an even wider range of users. He anticipates that Seagate Holos will ultimately be used to deliver a whole spectrum of management reporting applications across a university intranet.
The University of Aberdeen provides a good example of how an organisation`s use of Seagate Holos can gradually evolve over time. Perera and Davidson agree that this process is likely to continue into the future, with new applications being developed in several areas, including budgeting and human resources.
"As a long-term investment, Seagate Holos has turned out to be excellent: each version opens up new possibilities. Nothing else on the market would have allowed us to achieve as much. I have been using Holos for five years now, and I expect that I shall still be using it five years hence," concluded Davidson.
Share