Measure once, use often

The Defense Acquisition University, headquartered in Fort Belvoir, Va., has gotten a handle on this problem through the use of a data warehouse and data integration software.

Overseen by the secretary of Defense, DAU trains the Defense Department’s acquisition, technology and logistics personnel. It has six campuses across the country, and graduates 115,000 students a year. DAU has about 40 different sources of student, employee and finance data, which are fed into a data warehouse and used to generate more than 2,400 reports.

For the past two years, the agency has used the Informatica PowerCenter data integration platform from Informatica Corp. of Redwood City, Calif., to build the data warehouse and the Informatica PowerAnalyzer to compile reports.

The agency started the data warehouse to fuse forecast budget data—available only in a custom-built mainframe application for Defense finance accounting—with actual expenditures, which was kept in another DAU system. The agency’s IT staff also wanted to fuse data from an electronic time management system with this financial data. Now, DAU has all that data replicated in a single set of reports.

“I can look at the total cost of a specific item from both a nonlabor and a labor standpoint, whereas before I had to go to each different system to track those items,” said Chuck Cameron, the DAU systems engineer who oversaw the implementation. “I had to pull the data out and use the old spreadsheet method of mapping things to each other.”

Since the system went live, others in the agency have asked for similar summaries of their own material. “The sources have come fast and furious after we showed the functionality,” Cameron said.

Every faculty member gets a report on the success of their classes, as well as a status on their professional development. Managers get reports on class costs, teacher certifications and employee time accounting, as well as on graduation and attrition rates.

More news on related topics: Software Applications, Acquisition / Contracts, Defense IT, Knowledge Management