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The Decision Support Center
A Catalyst for Change

by Dinah Walters

Early this winter, a new group in Financial Management, the Decision Support Center (DSC), was created to enable the university community to better manage their business through the effective use of financial and administrative information. Currently, the Decision Support team consists of three members: Charles Bennett, Nate Findley, and me, Dinah Walters.

The vision of the DSC is campus-wide access to data and resources for analysis in support of decisions. The mission of our team is to be a financial information and analysis resource for the leaders of UW schools, colleges and administrative units. We are committed to cooperation and knowledge-sharing across the university data management community.

The DSC will to become a valuable tool in your quality improvement toolbox by assisting you in gathering the information you need to make informed decisions.

How will we get there?

The core focus of the DSC at this time is to partner in development with the Computing and Communications Data Warehousing Program (DWP) and be the voice of both the data and the customer.

The DWP is currently constructing an Exploration Data Warehouse of administrative information. Most of the data populating this data warehouse comes from our heritage financial systems such as FAS, HEPPS, and SDB. By the end of this summer, the Exploration Data Warehouse will be available for Central Institutional Analysts (CIAs) to access and explore. CIA’s are people in central campus departments who require cross departmental data to do their daily work. For example, the Data Analyst positions in GCA are considered CIA’s.

Initially, the DSC and the CIAs will create a number of ad-hoc reports that include information never before available from our heritage systems. Any of these that are determined to be useful to many users will be turned into "canned" reports available online to anyone who needs them.

The DSC will be an educational and communication resource and information portal – learning from, sharing with, informing, and teaching the University community. From there we will move to a financial consulting / analysis advisory role.

Charles, Nate and I look forward to assisting you with your data and analysis needs in the near future. We are located in the basement of Gerberding Hall, room B40 next to the vending machines. The door is always open, and your visit is most certainly welcome.