Data Warehousing and Document Imaging
This institution is currently involved in major efforts to transform its administrative processes as a means to improve the support provided to the educational, research and public service missions of the University. In partnership with many representatives of the campus community we are three years into our USER payroll/personnel project and one year into an effort to revamp the grant and contract proposal process, initial UIF funding having recently been approved for the 1999-01 biennium. The success of these two efforts is predicated on our belief that the institution's legacy systems can be married to developing web technologies, enabling significant improvements to campus service levels at a fraction of the cost required to completely replace our aging administrative systems. Concurrent with these efforts and the e-commerce opportunities currently being explored in depth, data warehousing and document imaging have been identified as strategic areas that can address a variety of critical information needs at the University.
Data Warehousing - the vision is to organize and develop a data warehouse whose initial area of concentration will be human resources information. The HR data warehouse will provide a structure for making HR data readily accessible to various user constituencies, processes to insure accurate and timely data in the warehouse and user friendly tools to facilitate access, manipulation, analysis and reporting.
Document Imaging - there are significant problems and costs associated with maintaining and sharing large collections of paper files. Most imaging systems involve proprietary software that must be maintained on all the client machines and many require proprietary networking protocols. In 1996 C&C and the Executive Vice President launched a University-developed document imaging system called ODIN. The benefits associated with this deployment of technology included increased productivity, recovered office space, improved customer service and greater job satisfaction. The measurable financial impacts suggest ODIN will pay for itself within four years. Expanding this technology to other departments could bring additional benefits at a lower marginal cost. The current effort is designed to modernize ODIN and to pursue further deployments of document imaging technology within the EVP's organization.
| Contact: |
Weldon Ihrig
Executive Vice President wihrig@u.washington.edu |
| Allocation: | $378,510 |
| Date Funded: | February 2000 |
