CMS Reports Committee

Responsibilities

• Evaluating how CSUF will handle batch job setup / submission, output generation, report distribution, report archiving and research / data mining against reports in the CMS environment for HR, Finance and Campus Solutions (Student Administration).
• Developing a list of requirements that will be used to evaluate 3rd-party Business Intelligence (reporting) tools to handle the following:

1. Creation of production and ad-hoc reports by technical staff and power-users for HR, Finance and Student Administration
2. Creation of canned-reports that can be accessed by end-users or run by end-users who could specify pre-determined run-time parameters

Key Decisions and Recommendations

The CMS Reports Committee evaluated several 3rd-party Business Intelligence products and has recommended to the CMS Steering Committee to continue using Hyperion (Brio) as CSUF’s Business Intelligence software platform (updating the software from version 6 to version 9) and to continue using FileNet to archive, access and distribute reports.  The CMS Steering Committee has reviewed and approved the recommendation of the CMS Reports Committee.  A demonstration of Hyperion is being scheduled for the CMS Steering Committee.  The Reporting Committee will continue to explore:

• How to provide better centralized support of Hyperion including report development, software management, Help Desk support and training.
• How to integrate Hyperion with FileNet as appropriate using FileNet as the repository for report storage in the CMS environment.

Hyperion was recommended for several reasons, including:

• The CSU has a statewide license with Hyperion;
• CSUF has an existing license with Hyperion;
• CSUF has existing experience and expertise with Hyperion;
• With the implementation of the CMS datawarehouse, there will be opportunities to share reports developed against the datawarehouse with other CSU campuses if reports are developed using a common Business Intelligence software as defined by the CSU;
• Hyperion meets the requirements identified below by the CMS Reports Committee.

The Reports Committee determined the following requirements for selecting the Business Intelligence software:

• Must be web-based and run equally well on both PC and Mac platforms
• Must be user-friendly with an easy-to-use interface for non-technical users
• Must be able to accommodate both simple reporting needs as well as complex reporting needs. 
• Must integrate easily with PeopleSoft and the Data Warehouse allowing reports to be run from either source
• Must support generation of output in a variety of formats including Excel, PDF, HTML, XML, various graphical formats, etc.
• Must support generation of pivot tables which can be filtered and drilled-down for analysis as needed
• Must provide a mechanism to imbed annotations in a report (like highlighting or sticky notes) so that others viewing the report can see those annotations
• Must provide an email delivery mechanism
• Must provide a report distribution mechanism so that a large report can be run once and recipients view only the specific portions of the report based on security parameters.
• Must allow integration with document management software in order to allow reports written in the Business Intelligence environment to be sent to the document management environment.
• Must provide security that controls access to data and reports
• Must also integrate with LDAP directories such as Microsoft Active Directory for authentication of users.
• Must allow for the definition of run-time parameters.
• Must allow reports to be scheduled to automatically be run at a pre-defined date/time as well as supporting ad-hoc running of reports
• Must provide an analytics tool that allows for the creation of a digital dashboard of information that could be included in a portal for end-users
• Must allow reports, cubes, etc. to be published as web services
• Must have sound architecture and hardware requirements and a commitment from the vendor to work in the Fusion environment
• Must have an effective administrative component including remote web-based administrative access

Page last updated:
October 26, 2006