The first goal of this TEST unit's continuous self improvement effort is to link the current year's assessment goals, objectives, performance indicators/criteria, results, and actions  to last year's assessment loop, specifically in relation to the plan of action projected in last year's Closing the Loop Summary.

The purpose of this goal is to describe the context in which the current year's self improvement efforts were launched or sustained. The Contextual description should reveal the unit's understanding of the previous continuous improvement action plan and its interaction with other conditions that may have impacted the implementation of that plan.This information will inform the recounting  of the current year's evaluation of our self-improvement efforts.

The IE Office (formerly IRA Office) FY11 Closing-the-Loops Action Plan intended for implementation in FY12 centered upon adjustments to acquiring, handling and extracting data due to the university's transition from a locally created legacy system to a Sungard  Banner system. The adjustments that were planned were construed with the expectation of minimal support from IT, based upon Its predictions  of IT's own overwhelming absorption in transitioning core universtiy functions to Banner system use.

FY11 Closing the Loops Summary       
"The following are the actions toward improvements that the IRA Office has in process and will be implementing into FY12:
(1) Above all else, the IRA Office will need to mine the conventional and unconventional veins of data acquisition and transformation which were discovered during the summer of 2011 and will undoubtedly need to uncover additional approaches to pursue when those veins fail to yield data in particular areas where gaps may appear. Strategies learned, that will be repeated and modified throughout FY12 will include working with targeted groups of functional users and data owners to attempt to discern which data that were collected in the central Legacy system are continuing to be collected in Banner, how they are collected, where they are stored and if they can be found in the ODS.
(2) The small group of IRA analysts will work together and very closely with IT to develop and share expertise in  Cognos report writing to improve IRA ability to help the university meet its needs for decision-making analyses and reports.  In addition, the IRA Office plans to propose means of more conveniently accessing and cannibalizing Cognos reports from ODS that are being written by members of the IT Reporting Team. This MAY improve and speed IRA analyst programming efforts and may have similar advantages for the members of the IT Reporting Team.
(3) In addition cross-scrutiny of programming to identify particular variables may benefit to the university by revealing unintentional discrepancies in variable definitions, thus leading toward the generation of a practical and concrete common university data dictionary.

The IRA Office will move forward as rapidly as possible with the use of COGNOS tools to create standard or recurring reports  using data that exists in Banner and ODS  (Summer 2011 forward). However,(4) the development of a pool of data which can be updated each term to add to or be used in IRA Oracle Developer environment either independently or  in conjunction with the historical IRA longitudinal database developed from Legacy data will share high priority status in planning,  time and effort allocations.  This effort to develop a second pool of current frozen data in addition to what can be directly tapped in the ODS using Cognos is required because ad hoc and highly complex reports have been noted to run much more slowly and be far more error prone using Cognos than using IRA ORACLE Developer SQL or SPSS. Ultimately, the redundancy which, to some may appear to be an inefficient focus of resources, is necessary until the university ERP is improved – an expectation which is not reasonable, according to IT leadership,  for another two to three years from the campus-wide implementation of  the ERP.

(5)The IRA Office has planned for several years to improve the accuracy, efficiency and convenience of its work order and job documentation through automation.  One means of achieving this would be to recreate the IRA Work Order table as a database that can be fed by the web work order template. The obstacle to moving forward with this plan has been externally imposed.  Given the primacy of ERP transformation issues throughout the university it is not likely that this plan will be prioritized; however, we can dream & plan.  We will attempt to move closer to having the university approve IRA creation and use of a much more efficient work order documentation and tracking system without having to resort to using the work order system currently in place for IT.  We are not pleased with that system and it would seriously complicate work order submission for our clients, but, as the new Fiscal year opens, it still appears that this may be the only available alternate option at this time.

We will need to be constantly ready to change plans and pursue different approaches, as well as to pursue different short term objectives within months or even weeks of having set the goals objectives of this action plan. This modus operandi will be critical to IRA operations and success  while running the current and future obstacle course which lies directly ahead."

(1) Above all else, the IRA Office will need to mine the conventional and unconventional veins of data acquisition and transformation which were discovered during the summer of 2011 and will undoubtedly need to uncover additional approaches to pursue when those veins fail to yield data in particular areas where gaps may appear. Strategies learned, that will be repeated and modified throughout FY12 will include working with targeted groups of functional users and data owners to attempt to discern which data that were collected in the central Legacy system are continuing to be collected in Banner, how they are collected, where they are stored and if they can be found in the ODS.

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(2) The small group of IRA analysts will work together and very closely with IT to develop and share expertise in  Cognos report writing to improve IRA ability to help the university meet its needs for decision-making analyses and reports.  In addition, the IRA Office plans to propose means of more conveniently accessing and cannibalizing Cognos reports from ODS that are being written by members of the IT Reporting Team. This MAY improve and speed IRA analyst programming efforts and may have similar advantages for the members of the IT Reporting Team.

(3) Cross-scrutinize report programming to identify particular variables may benefit to the university by revealing unintentional discrepancies in variable definitions, thus leading toward the generation of a practical and concrete common university data dictionary.

(5) Develop a pool of "frozen" data which can be updated each term in the IRA Oracle Developer environment either independently, or (preferrably) in conjunction with the IRA longitudinal database, or in conjunction wth alternative logitudinal databases of official university data in ODS packages. 

This effort to develop a second pool of current frozen data in addition to what can be directly tapped in the ODS using Cognos is required because ad hoc and highly complex reports have been noted to run much more slowly and be far more error prone using Cognos than using IRA ORACLE Developer SQL or SPSS. Ultimately, the redundancy which, to some may appear to be an inefficient focus of resources, is necessary until the university ERP is improved – an expectation which is not reasonable, according to IT leadership,  for another two to three years from the campus-wide implementation of  the ERP.

This action will have high priority.

(5) The IRA Office has planned for several years to improve the accuracy, efficiency and convenience of its work order and job documentation through automation.  One means of achieving this would be to recreate the IRA Work Order table as a database that can be fed by the web work order template. The obstacle to moving forward with this plan has been externally imposed.  Given the primacy of ERP transformation issues throughout the university it is not likely that this plan will be prioritized; however, we can dream & plan.  We will attempt to move closer to having the university approve IRA creation and use of a much more efficient work order documentation and tracking system without having to resort to using the work order system currently in place for IT.  We are not pleased with that system and it would seriously complicate work order submission for our clients, but, as the new Fiscal year opens, it still appears that this may be the only available alternate option at this time.

(6) We will need to be constantly ready to change plans and pursue different approaches, as well as to pursue different short term objectives within months or even weeks of having set the goals objectives of this action plan. This modus operandi will be critical to IRA operations and success  while running the current and future obstacle course which lies directly ahead

Several of the major FY11 Closing-the-Loops Action Plan directly influenced objectives and KPIs for FY program improvement, however, overall, the FY11 Closing-the-Loops Action Plan was truly a long-range plan and many of the necessary actions that it promoted will continue to be importantant to the future progress and future improvement of this unit.

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