Data Warehousing

School Districts, State Education Agencies, and Local Governments are increasingly realizing the power of their data. But accessing good data—data that tells you how well you are serving your citizens—is often easier said than done. Many organizations—especially public sector agencies—have established computer system "silos" that don’t connect to one another. This disconnected data impedes good, informed decision-making.

• A school system can tell you that a student is taking advantage of a new reading program, but it can’t tell you whether that reading program leads to better results.
• A state education agency can tell you how many years their teachers have been working with the state, but it can’t tell you whether teacher experience has any relationship to student success.
• A city housing department can help bring affordable housing to a neighborhood, but it can’t tell you whether the project leads to safer streets, healthier citizens, or better jobs.

Data warehousing connects siloed data and allows public leaders to realize a complete return on investment on their data systems by breaking the information out of their silos.

Building a data warehouse is not just a technology project, it is a culture change project. Just integrating your data silos alone will not improve your performance. Your organization also must change the way it uses data as a tool to make decisions, allocate resources, and evaluate performance.

UPD can provide you with subject and technical expertise in the planning, procurement, roll-out and implementation of data warehouses in school districts, state education agencies, and local governments.

• UPD analyzes the technical and human capacities of the organization leveraging our knowledge of the factors that maximize performance.
• UPD can plan, procure, roll-out, and implement your data warehouse system. This includes basic business functionality, implementing change management strategies and implementing data governance processes.
• UPD can coordinate grant applications with State Education Agencies to win federal grant funding for state longitudinal data systems.

In addition, UPD can partner with a technology vendor of data warehouses to provide content matter expertise, implementation expertise, and "Stat" system implementation to track the performance of both the vendor and the public sector partners during implementation. UPD’s ability to package a vendor’s system in a language and framework that is more relevant to the user will speed the decision-making processes, delivery of the product and help to keep costs down.