The University of Massachusetts

The University of Massachusetts (UMass) stands as a distinguished public university system within the Commonwealth, with its flagship campus rooted in Amherst. Established in 1863 as the Massachusetts Agricultural College, it evolved into the comprehensive UMass system, now encompassing multiple campuses, including medical, Boston, Lowell, and Dartmouth locations.

Recognised as a leading public research institution in the United States, UMass collectively drives significant economic impact and conducts vital research.

The Amherst campus, the largest within the system and a member of the Five Colleges consortium, provides a broad spectrum of undergraduate and graduate programs. Dedicated to accessible, high-quality education and the state's advancement, UMass attracts a diverse student body and a large faculty committed to both teaching and impactful research across numerous fields.

The Problem

The university’s goal was to migrate its on-premises OBIEE. This migration project formed part of their large-scale transformation programme intended to reduce the university’s reliance on deprecated hardware and software, with OBIEE soon to be unsupported by Oracle.

The client wanted to reduce the operational expenditure on maintenance and administration of their network, database environments and application servers.

OAC is Platform as a Service, which minimises the need to upgrade, patch or manage the service in-house, and as a cloud platform, offers scalability and flexibility.

Migration requires expertise and experience to reduce its impact and cost. The client needed guidance to find the best solution. Rittman Mead has experience completing complex migrations and understands the impact on organisations. We managed the migration and were able to upskill the university's team through platform training.

The Solution

Rittman Mead worked closely with the team at the University of Massachusetts to build a proof of concept (POC) to confirm that OAC meets the practical needs, security, scalability, and usability requirements of the university.

Having agreed the POC, we worked with the university in phase one of their user adoption programme. We provided end-users with an initial demonstration showing new functionality and enhancements.

We were able to streamline the migration process. Using our experience migrating customers, we have a tried-and-tested process. We used our regression testing tool to reduce time spent on QA, without compromising on quality. We supported the university through a cycle of testing and fixes before rolling it out to production. Rittman Mead then set up performance monitoring, so the in-house development team could keep an eye on the resources used by system.

Phase two of the user adoption programme saw us complete three training courses to target different user types: technical, admin and end-user. This encouraged smooth onboarding to OAC for all stakeholders of the new system.

For the migration, we spun up an OAC instance, configured it, connected to the on-premise data warehouse, set up the security and imported the OBIEE RPD and Web catalog.

The Benefits

  • OAC is flexible and scalable, they now have the flexibility to turn on and off services as they need.

  • There’s no more need to do costly, disruptive upgrades.

  • OAC provides access to services that were not available on OBIEE, including data visualisation and improved self-service reporting, allowing users to write their own reports and integrate a wider range of data sources, eliminating the IT bottleneck.

  • Rittman Mead’s migration approach ensured there was zero disruption, so users were able to continue their work throughout the migration.

  • Our user adoption programme created confident end-users, helping the university make the most of their new platform and utilise the new functionality to gain additional insight from their data.

  • The team at the University of Massachusetts were freed up to concentrate on improved self-service, making access to data more democratised.

“Rittman Mead’s migration approach ensured there was zero disruption. Users were able to continue their work throughout the migration”.

Shahriar Panahi

Senior Director, Enterprise Data and Analytics at University of Massachusetts