University Business - August 2006 - (Page 58)

Good Data IN, Good Data OUT A program at DePauw University crawls the database every day, searching for duplicate entries. Seeing double? That's what DePauw University Ind. administrators thought when a new athletics database started duplicating student records, making the football team look a lot larger than it actually was. as high school visits, PSAT and SAT scores, and a university mar- Unifying Resources keting company. Having a system that allowed duplicate records would become a nightmare, and quickly. Although IHEs may have data pulled from a number of sources, It's taken us about two years to really figure out how to stop many administrators have found that centralizing the information duplicates, and make sure we're inputting quality data in the first is key to managing it. place, says Pfeifer. Now that we have it down, it's a huge help in At DePauw, university staff spent four years integrating data knowing our numbers are right. into a central repository, known as Client Information Service, DePauw is far from alone in its quest to manage multiple da- which also serves as a university-wide address book. In addition to tabases, a task that's challenging for any sized institution of higher records for the school's 2,400 current students and their parents are education. Data about prospective students mingles with alumni records for about 60,000 prospective students and their parents, records, parent information, fundraising databases, and even finan- plus around 80,000 alumni and donor records. cial data. Keeping it all straight takes effort and communication, Prior to unifying the information, the university had a legacy but as many IHEs have discovered, the task is crucial for keeping system where prospectives, current students, and alumni were costs in check and boosting data accuracy. stored in separate systems. But record overlap became a significant problem, says Pfeifer. Not only did some prospective students en- Information Overload roll, subsequently appearing in two databases, but alumni tended to send their children to the school as well meaning a parent As nearly anyone associated with a college or university knows, da- could conceivably land in all three databases. tabases abound in an academic environment. Not only are student To manage the data and eliminate duplicates, DePauw's IT de- records rife with grade reports and tuition statements, but schools partment wrote programs that crawl the database every day, search- have data on everything from how many desks are in a certain ing for matches based on different fields like address or phone classroom to which donors have contributed in the past year. number. Also created were relationship algorithms that evaluate The result for some institutions is an abundance of databases connections between records. For example, a student's parents are that contain similar information. The Bursar office might have checked separately for errors but also evaluated against each other, student records online, but so does the Admissions office, as well to see if they live at the same address or are still married. as individual undergraduate or graduate program offices, and even In a sense, we have to triangulate people, relationships, and Food Services. their location, says Pfeifer. Because we started from scratch, we As these databases are created and expanded, eliminating dupli- were able to design a system specifically for university communica- cates can be costly work, sometimes requiring days of manual dele- tion and the typical relationships that are meaningful in a univer- tion. If the databases are used to send out catalogs or other mail, sity context. bad addresses increase the university's costs. Although in-house applications like DePauw's can be devel- It's a huge issue for any institution, says Nancy Krogh, regis- oped, there are also many cleaning solutions on the market, trar at the University of Idaho. Having multiple databases has be- usually in the form of a service. At Yale University, for example, come a bigger and bigger problem over the past few years, as more records are sent out to AlumniFinder, which puts together address information is being input and used to make decisions on both the and other contact information from multiple sources. departmental and university-wide level. 58 | August 2006 universitybusiness.com 85 ddni.naelCataD MA 23:44:01 60/42/7 http://universitybusiness.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of University Business - August 2006

Contents
College Index
Advisory Board
Company Index
Editor's Note
People Watch
Sense of Place
Stats Watch
Viewpoint
Financial Aid
On the Hill
Admissions
Future Shock
An Education in AV Technology
Retention Intentions
Endowment Management
Good Data In, Good Data Out
Sticking with the Tried & True
Home, Sweet Home
Faculty Issues in Online Education
Internet Technology
What's New
Calendar of Events
Direct Connect
End Note

University Business - August 2006