What is the EDW? (hint: it’s not the same thing as UBI)

Contributed by Mark Anderson

As we move toward the future state of reporting and analytics at UVA, it’s a good time to hit refresh on a few basic concepts. Let’s start with EDW, the Enterprise Data Warehouse.

We often hear EDW and UBI thrown into conversations about reporting and analytics almost interchangeably, as though they refer to the same thing. They don’t.

The enterprise data warehouse is a repository that stores and manages much of UVA’s current and historical enterprise data from the Integrated System/Oracle, SIS/Peoplesoft, and Workday HCM so that it can be used by various reporting systems across grounds or provision curated data to other Data Marts. The EDW will continue to serve this purpose in the future state with the addition of Workday Financial Data.

Like the warehouse in Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Enterprise Data
Warehouse is vast; unlike that warehouse, its contents are
things we want you to find easily.

The EDW is not the same as University Business Intelligence (UBI) (website link), UBI is a reporting & analytics tool that most of us use to access the data that is stored in EDW and other sources– primarily via structured reports. UBI will continue to serve this purpose for historical (pre-Workday) finance and SIS/Student reporting & analytics.

As we’ve discussed previously, the tools we use in the future will change as Workday and Adaptive tools replace UBI for many financial reporting & analytics needs.

The Reporting and Analytics FST team, along with a cross-functional group of partners from across Grounds is currently working on designing, building, and testing a scalable reporting and analytics service model for the future. Our work includes planning to optimize all available reporting & analytics tools in our toolkit as well as facets of data governance, including developing a data and report catalog, business glossary, and controls on data quality.

Watch for more information on the future of reporting and analytics here in the blog. You can also see past updates on the FST website and in the Online Community.

Related content: Historical data will not be remapped to the FDM in the EDW.  Check out the FST Decision Log for more information.