Spring 2010 Management Symposium

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Strategic Planning,
Collaborations and
Enriching Services

 

 

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Session: Strategic Planning, Collaborations and Enriching Services

Speakers:
Navneet Goyal, BITS, Pilani, India
J. P. Misra, BITS, Pilani, India

Title: Scalable Business Intelligence System Architecture for a Multi-campus University in India

India is slated to become a major education hub in the 21st century. Many top universities of the world are looking for tie-ups with Indian Universities and are also in the process of independently setting up full-fledged campuses in India. Universities in India need to gear themselves up for this challenge & opportunity, especially in terms of the IT infrastructure which still remains the weakest link.

One of the factors that will decide the survival and growth of a university in the highly competitive higher education space would be the ability to capture, maintain, and analyze the academic and related data that gets generated. And for doing so, a university would need a robust and scalable BI system. The architecture of the system should be such that it can handle the future growth of the university in terms of increase in enrollment, increase in modes of operation (primarily e-learning), increase in programmes being offered, & increase in number of campuses.

The architecture of the BI system, in a multi-campus setup, is governed by many factors which have varying influence on it. A typical Indian university has various functional departments/divisions, each one has developed their own independent processes/systems for carrying out day-to-day operations. These systems were generally developed at different points of time and are therefore highly heterogeneous in terms of hardware & software used. These systems are like islands of information in the university and it necessitates an integrating framework to obtain a holistic view of university data. Integration of these systems is extremely difficult. Even if we are able to integrate, the same model cannot be replicated at any new campus as we would need different hardware, different software, and people with different skill sets to run the "integrated" system.

In the above context, it becomes imperative to develop an architectural framework for a university BI system which is scalable, secure, & fault tolerant. The choice of the architecture (centralized vs. distributed), the choice of software (proprietary vs. open source), and the choice of computing framework (cloud computing vs. conventional computing) requires a detailed discussion, in the light of the constraints faced by any typical university in India or in any other developing country.