News: Data and Analytics

In September, Lynne Sanbe and CK Bhatia will join The Ohio State University as Chief Applications Officer and Chief Data Integrations Officer.

Lynne joins Ohio State from Temple University, where she has served as Associate Vice President of Information Technology Services, Applications, and Data since 2007. She has a deep understanding of large ERP systems and the complexities of smaller, homegrown systems. In addition, she has a strong commitment to transparency, cross-team collaboration, and finding creative solutions to challenging problems. As the Chief Applications Officer, Lynne will lead new technology implementations, upgrades, and operational strategies for university-wide administrative systems. Further, the Chief Applications Officer manages systems development, maintenance, configuration, incidents, and requests for existing ERP systems and other administrative systems, which include COTS, SAAS, Mobile, and custom applications. She will work closely with stakeholders to ensure systems maximize effectiveness, efficiency, and quality to take full advantage of available technology.

CK joins the university from Farm-Credit Mid-America, a financial services company where he served as the Chief Data Officer. CK is an innovative strategic thinker with over 20 years of experience in data-driven decision-making and cross-team collaboration. His background in healthcare, financial services, telecom, and marketing has prepared him for the complexities of a large institution such as Ohio State. As the Chief Data Integrations Officer (CDIO), CK will be charged with uplifting the data maturity of the university to become more disciplined in its approach to how data is collected, stored, and used and providing modern and scalable data infrastructure. In addition, as CDIO, CK will be a key participant in strategic technology collaborations with university stakeholders, intra-university groups, and consortiums.

In their roles, Lynne and CK will collaborate with other OTDI leaders, key business partners, and the OSU Wexner Medical Center Chief Information Officer to optimize Administrative Systems across the University and Medical Center. Additionally, they will work to ensure the development and management of data repositories, an integrated enterprise data warehouse, and decision support applications enabling data users to access timely critical information to support strategic and tactical decision-making. Finally, in campus-wide collaboration with IT and business leaders, they will drive the definition and adoption of Application and Data Management strategies to align process and practice with the university’s strategic plan.

Both of these roles will report to Cindy Leavitt, Vice President and Chief Information Officer, and serve as members of the Office of Technology and Digital Innovation (OTDI) Senior Leadership Team.

During the week of September 5, the Data and Analytics team made significant progress in loading and validating the Journal Line reload to the Reporting and Analytics Environment (RAE). The final validations were successful with some explainable variances due to test environments. With the upcoming Workday 2022R2 update this Saturday, 9/10, we need some additional time to work around this critical event. 

To date, data through July 2022 has been loaded to the RAE validation environment. To complete the remainder of the load and validation, work will continue this weekend before and after the Sept. 10 Workday upgrade. 

With that, here is the Data and Analytics team’s plan for completing the final steps for this reload: 

1. Prepare the Production RAE environment to enable the reloaded dataset. Note: at this point data through July 2022 will be in Production RAE.
2. Pause for the Workday 2022R2 production update on Saturday, 9/10.
3. Later Saturday afternoon/evening, we will pull August and September 2022 dataset from Workday.
4. Load the August and September 2022 data to the Production RAE.
5. From Saturday, September 10 through Monday, September 12, we’ll complete the validation effort for the final dataset. 

If you have other questions or concerns, please contact Enterprise-Analytics@osu.edu.

*9/1 Update*

Friday, September 9 is the new target date for general availability for the full data load. 

It is important to note that these data issues DO NOT impact Workday reports. To obtain a list of reports that are potentially affected within Tableau that utilize Journal Line data, please contact Lonnie Morgan (morgan.223@osu.edu).

If you have other questions or concerns, please contact Enterprise-Analytics@osu.edu.

*Original Message*

Reporting users have shared that sporadic data is missing from Tableau reports using the “[CERTIFIED] Workday FIN Mart - Journal Line Detail” Tableau data source. This data source is powered by journal line related datasets flowing into the Reporting and Analytics Environment (RAE) from Workday. 

Due to financial processing and transactions, at the end of each fiscal year and during the switch to the new year, there is a very large number of data points flowing for journal lines into the RAE. In the past, issues have occurred in processing those large datasets due to timeouts and resource constraints. Unfortunately, the issue is occurring again. Correcting the missing data records requires falling back on manual processing and file generation. As of this morning, there is data in both the June and July 2022 datasets is known to be missing.

For the past six months, the Data and Analytics team has been working to optimize this data flow with partners on the Workday Integrations team. The new process is more stable than our current data flow and is using an integrations PUSH model vs. a web service PULL model. The next steps are being taken to move the new process into production. Once in PROD, the Workday Journal Lines data loads will be run into the RAE, catching up on any missing data, including the data identified above.

The cutover to PROD for the new process, as well as the reload/update of the journal lines data in the RAE is expected to be complete by August 24, 2022.

Once data is updated in the RAE, these new datasets will be reflected in the Tableau data sources and associated workbooks the following day.

The Data and Analytics team apologizes for any inconvenience the user community is experiencing. All efforts are being made to correct the issue as quickly as possible. Thank you to the user community for your continued patience.

Please note that this issue is limited to journal lines data in the RAE and Tableau. For a current and complete view of financial data, the reports and datasets in Workday directly provide the most current information and data.

If you have questions or concerns, please contact Enterprise-Analytics@osu.edu.

The OTDI Tableau team is pleased to announce the launch of our first training, Tableau Server Fundamentals. This live, 45-minute zoom webinar is intended for anyone who accesses Tableau reports on the university’s server. At the end of training, attendees will learn how to navigate Tableau Server as well as how to set up subscriptions to regularly monitor data, create and save report parameters, and share data. This class will not cover how to create reports.

All attendees must have a Tableau Server ID to participate. Check your status by logging into Tableau Server with your lastname.# credentials. If you do not have a Tableau Server ID, an account can be requested via ServiceNow.

Space is limited to 20 people per session. After live sessions are complete, this material will be available on demand via BuckeyeLearn.

Please use the BuckeyeLearn link to register or search for “Tableau Server Fundamentals” in BuckeyeLearn.

If you have any questions, please contact us at data-visualization@osu.edu.

Last week, the Data and Analytics Team published a new dashboard to help data analysts better understand which datasets they have access to within the Reporting and Analytics Environment (RAE).

This new “RAE User Domain Access” dashboard displays a user’s name, login, and the list of domains and equivalent security groups to which they belong within the RAE. This membership governs the types of data available to them for querying. The dashboard will display the logged-in user’s information by default. If desired, the view can be changed to view the group affiliation of other users by changing the filters (located in the upper right corner of the dashboard).

The new dashboard can be found on the OTDI Tableau Server environment. (https://dataviz.rae.osu.edu/#/views/RAEUserDomains/UserDomainAccess?=null&:iid=2)

This update is part of our continuous improvement efforts to make Ohio State enterprise analytics easier to use and understand for our data analyst community. If you have any questions or comments, please contact the Tableau team at Data-Visualization@osu.edu.