Customer Solution Case Study
/ / AustralianUniversity Graduates to Sophisticated Course Costing Model
Overview
Country or Region:Australia
Industry:Education
Customer Profile
Located in Western Australia, MurdochUniversity is a research-intensive university with more than 12,600 students and 1,300 staff.
Business Situation
MurdochUniversity needed a powerful database tool to build a costing model that would pull together information from several sources and provide secure analysis and reporting.
Solution
Murdoch chose a series of Microsoft® database and analytics products, including SQL Server™2000, SQL Server 2000 Analysis Services, SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services and Visual Studio® .NET 2003.
Benefits
High level of database security
Simple application integration
User-friendly interface
Makes use of existing investment in Microsoft Office
Scalable / "You can produce fabulously sophisticated things faster and faster with .NET. Because of its modular nature, you don't have to reinvent the wheel."
Phillip Hutchison, Manager Business Systems, Office of Policy and Planning, MurdochUniversity
Calculating the cost of delivering tertiary education is a headache for most universities. But with the Australian tertiary sector moving to a market-driven framework, and competition for students and government funding intensifying, understanding the costs of delivering degrees has become critical. MurdochUniversity in Western Australia needed a powerful database tool that would help staff and executive management analyze the way it allocated resources and dollars to deliver courses to students. Witha series of Microsoft® products, including Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000, SQL Server2000 Analysis Services, SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services and Visual Studio® .NET 2003, Murdoch built a sophisticated, customized course costing model at the forefront of analytics tools in the Australian tertiary sector. The model provides a basis for decision making that will guide the university well into the future.
Situation
As government reforms introduce a market-driven framework to tertiary education in Australia, university IT departments are being forced to ‘get with the times.’
Concepts like ‘competition’ and ‘cost allocation,’ normally the domain of the private sector, have now become catch-cries of major education institutions—and technology has emerged as an important enabler.
MurdochUniversity, a forward-thinking, research-intensive university based in Western Australia, is medium sized—with 12,600 students. It competes for student numbers and government dollars. This makes understanding processes and cost structures crucial for Murdoch to properly allocate funds.
In any university, the allocation of costs associated with delivering courses is a murky business. Students take many combinations of courses to make up their degrees—often from different academic schools. Academics fulfill a number of roles, from lecturing and tutoring to research. It all makes building an accurate costing model a complex and daunting task—but one Murdoch was determined to tackle.
“One of the challenges with most universities is that everyone goes on their merry way until the government says they’re going to change something and there’s a mad panic to figure out what the impact is,” says Phillip Hutchison, Manager Business Systems for Murdoch’s Office of Policy and Planning.
He says, “We wanted to create a solid architectural foundation so we fully understand our business processes and can quickly respond to threats and challenges.
“There’s always something changing somewhere, either internally or externally, and we need to be able to pre-empt those changes.”
The Policy and Planning team believed that a detailed costing model would allow Murdoch’s planners and decision makers to step back and get a more accurate perspective of its operations. This insight would help them adjust delivery methods and allocate funding appropriately.
Says Hutchison: “If you step outside the mentality that prevails in the education area and look at businesses that are trying to become ‘state-of-the-art’, they know what data they need to collect and they collect it well. They’re more interested in what the data is telling them and how it can give them an edge.”
Murdoch had begun building a costing model using Microsoft® Excel®. However, the volume of data soon exceeded the application’s limits.
The university needed a powerful database to manage information from a variety of sources at a granular level, while also providing an overview for executive staff. The system needed to be easy to use and it had to integrate with existing Microsoft Office desktop applications.
Conceptualizing the model was a significant job, according to Hutchison.
“We spent a lot of time pulling apart what it means to cost a course,” he says. “The model asks what the basic commodity is that we actually deliver.
“This meant we needed to develop something that was multi-dimensional—that allows us to take a large amount of information down to the individual student and what units they take, as well as other information to do with how courses are funded so we can actually do the analysis.”
Solution
Murdoch chose a series of Microsoft database and analytics products, including Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000, SQL Server 2000 Analysis Services, SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services and Visual Studio® .NET 2003. The choice was a departure from the university's existing database environment.
“We’re effectively an Oracle shop at Murdoch,” says Hutchison. “We chose SQL [Server] because we had some familiarity with it and because of Analysis Services, which ships free with the product.
“Since we’ve commenced this project we’ve no longer had to license other software like Business Objects because we can get enough analytical power out of Microsoft SQL [Server].”
Hutchison wanted a solution that integrated well with Murdoch’s existing desktop packages, like Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word.
“Microsoft SQL Server, and the integrated security that comes with it, allows people to use a variety of packages easily to explore the data,” says Hutchison.
“We really wanted people to understand that it is possible to do a lot with what we’ve got, without having to spend a fortune on other technologies.
“Microsoft Office is an incredibly powerful product if you want to fully exploit what it can do. With some of the alternative products, you have to install a lot of client software to get at the data. With Microsoft, we don’t have a huge desktop footprint with a lot of additional maintenance overhead.”
Murdoch looked into the future direction of Microsoft software before committing.
“We felt that as Microsoft software was evolving, it increasingly allowed us to do everything we wanted without too much difficulty,” Hutchison says.
Benefits
Building the costing model from scratch without third-party resources meant Hutchison and his team needed technology that produced sophisticated results, without requiring brain surgery to build.
“The bonus with Microsoft,” says Hutchison, “was that the integration across the products, plus the portability of knowledge from one product to another, meant we could cover some complex tasks relatively quickly, without having to do radically different things.”
.NET Integration
The Policy and Planning team at Murdoch had a solid understanding of Microsoft Visual Basic® programming, which made .NET a sound fit for building the interface that staff would use to access the costing model.
“We did some .NET training and built a sophisticated client tool that talks to the database and makes it easy for users to fill in details quickly,” Hutchison says.
“A lot of people think everything is going entirely Web-based. But because this was so easy to deploy—with a single click, everything installs and works fine—we can produce a rich environment that’s easy to build, deploy and maintain.”
The client tool communicates with the costing model’s back-end database. To analyze data, users can easily hook up to Microsoft Excel, Access or Word.
Staff have also been experimenting with smart tags. As they type in a course unit, the application—whether it is Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel—recognizes the text and talks to the database to automatically retrieve the information.
With the initial development under their belts, Hutchison’s team is on a fast learning curve with .NET. “You can produce fabulously sophisticated things faster and faster with .NET,” Hutchison says. “Because of its modular nature, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.”
Securing Sensitive Data
With the granular and highly sensitive nature of the information in the Murdoch costing model database, the Policy and Planning team faced significant security concerns from the university’s academic, human resources and financial staff.
“Because the system is sophisticated and detailed, we want to ensure that no-one can see anything they shouldn’t, and be certain that it is not used for anything that isn’t agreed to by all parties,” Hutchison says.
The Microsoft solution allowed Murdoch to create a high degree of security with a low level of maintenance.
“If you have logged on to our network as an authenticated user, you can automatically access the data,” Hutchison explains. “But through the .NET architecture there is a substantial security infrastructure both within the application and the database, with many layers of access to information.”
Installing Active Directory®service (part of the Windows® 2000 Server operating system) means updating user details and permissions and adding new users can be done simply from one central point. Hutchison says they had difficulty making secure access simple before Active Directory was deployed.
“Now we have seamless security,” he says. “Users don’t have to log in again and again. It simplifies a lot of things that could otherwise get quite messy.”
Powerful Reporting
For MurdochUniversity’s costing model to have strategic value, it must make sense of an array of detailed data. Murdoch needed a powerful reporting package that would give it the control to manage different levels of access to information.
“Microsoft [SQL Server 2000] Reporting Services gave us the exact reporting architecture we needed exactly on time,” says Hutchison. “It has a huge number of reports that are sophisticated and it provides a very nice architecture. We can also drill down to the last level of detail in the database.”
Keeping It Simple
Murdoch wanted to make sure its staff didn’t need a degree to access the costing model information. The information had to be accessible to people with all levels of expertise in standard desktop applications.
“We wanted non-technical people, such as the Heads of Schools, to be able to quickly find something without having to know Excel inside out,” says Hutchison.
“When we show people what they can do with their existing desktop software, they are very surprised. They have never heard of some of those things. But once we’ve shown it to them, they want everything tomorrow!”
Scaling Ivory Towers
Hutchison’s team sees the initial costing model as the beginning of a database initiative that could be scaled across the university.
“We’d like to use the SQL Server as a gateway to all systems,” says Hutchison. “Rather than duplicate data, it would connect all our third-party systems through one point of entry.”
Satis Arnold, Director of Policy and Planning for MurdochUniversity, knows a sophisticated model when he sees one. He has worked with university resource allocation models in Australia and for other countries through projects funded by the World Bank. “I appreciate the quality of the Murdoch costing model,” he says. “It gives us an important management tool to understand the cost of teaching and research.
“The government approach to funding universities on a per-student basis is no longer a safe indicator of the cost of teaching and research training. The costing model will help us stay competitive at a time when universities are feeling the squeeze of public funding cuts and need to increase the number of fee-paying students.
“This model allows us to understand the resource levels needed to remain viable, and to set prices for fee-paying students from Australia and overseas.”
Microsoft .NET
Microsoft .NET is software that connects people, information, systems, and devices through the use of Web services. Web services are a combination of protocols that enable computers to work together by exchanging messages. Web services are based on the standard protocols of XML, SOAP, and WSDL, which allow them to interoperate across platforms and programming languages.
.NET is integrated across Microsoft products and services, providing the ability to quickly build, deploy, manage, and use connected, secure solutions with Web services. These solutions provide agile business integration and the promise of information anytime, anywhere, on any device.
For more information about Microsoft .NETand Web services, please visit these Web sites:
msdn.microsoft.com/webservices