Enterprise Data
AITS is a resource for administrative enterprise data for the university. This data is generally available in three forms:
- Reports (sourced from a number of applications/locations)
- Data access for queries or client developed reports
- Integrations between systems
Reports
Hundreds of reports are available in the student, finance, and human resources areas. The AITS Reporting Team develops, modifies, and maintains customer requested custom reports. If you have a reporting request, please submit your request to the AITS Service Desk including a 1-2 paragraph description of the requested work and it will be assigned to the appropriate functional and/or technical area to be assessed.
Data Access
Operational data (data that is updated through the course of business operations) from enterprise systems is available for units to access ad hoc or to feed into custom developed unit reports. There are several ways to access this data depending on the source, nature, and timeliness of the data required. If you have a data request, please submit your request to the AITS Service Desk including a 1-2 paragraph description of the requested work and it will be assigned to the appropriate functional and/or technical area to be assessed.
Decision Support offers transformed, historical data via a Data Warehouse environment for data access and reporting. See the Decision Support web site for current services and access information.
Integrations
A common requirement is to interface data between different applications. Integrations can provide opportunities for receiving data in a near real-time manner with minimal interdependencies between systems. AITS performs this activity for integrations with administrative enterprise systems using an OpenEAI integration architecture. A typical integration project interfaces data between external systems and Banner, which is the University’s authoritative source for most data related to University students, faculty, and staff. Integrations allow data to flow from one system to another, and allow systems to stay synchronized; this improves data timeliness and quality, and avoids redundancy in data maintenance.
Enterprise Objects have been defined and are in use at the University of Illinois to allow applications to request changes to enterprise data, and to communicate changes of enterprise data to other applications. An Enterprise Object is a structured collection of related data elements, usually implemented as an XML document, that is used to synchronize, update, add, delete or query enterprise data. See Enterprise Objects for details, sample objects, and definitions.
If you have an integration request, please submit your request to the AITS Service Desk including a 1-2 paragraph description of the requested work and it will be assigned to the appropriate functional and/or technical area to be assessed.
Many integration requests involve considerable effort and become specific projects. If the requested work is estimated to exceed 250 hours, a project proposal will be required to be submitted. Information regarding submitting a project proposal can be found on the ITPC website.