University Of St Andrews

The University of St Andrews, established in Scotland, 1413, holds the distinction of being the oldest of Scotland's four ancient universities and the third-oldest in the English-speaking world. Building on its long-standing reputation, the University of St Andrews has twice been recognised as "University of the Year" by The Times and Sunday Times' Good University Guide, achieving this prestigious title most recently in 2022. It stands as one of only two UK universities to have earned this distinction.

Its student population of over 10,000 is notably diverse, with over 145 nationalities represented. This significant diversity presents a challenge in managing their academic progress and well-being. 

The Problem

Student administrators rely on a data warehouse and reporting system to gain insight into the students, how they perform academically, funding, attendance rates, and pastoral details such as accommodation and wellbeing. With a large percentage of students coming from overseas, providing this support is critical since many of them bring a wide range of cultural backgrounds, languages, and academic experiences. Many of these students are also young and living far away from their homes. 

These insights were also used in the planning of facilities within the University. For example, during the COVID pandemic, a larger-than-usual number of students joined St Andrews but studied remotely. However, as travel restrictions came to a close, this increased number of students were now expecting to attend in person. Data analysis assisted in the capacity planning for facilities and accommodation.

The data warehouse was part of a wider data transformation programme to meet new demands from business users to become more data-driven in decision-making. A review of the warehouse was performed to understand if it was fit for purpose, in which several issues were highlighted:

  • The complexity of making change

  • The ability to onboard new people to the development team

  • The ease and reliability of promoting changes to test and production

  • The lack of lineage, making it hard to do impact analysis

  • The granularity of the security model; duplication of reporting data making it more prone to inconsistency

  • The lack of agreed definitions and documentation

The Solution

St Andrews decided to review several design methodologies and tools to help resolve these issues and asked Rittman Mead to support the selection process. Rittman Mead recommended three additional tools and two design techniques to be included in the review process.

To help the university make an objective decision about the best tool to adopt, Rittman Mead’s team worked with St Andrews to create a capability matrix. This matrix rated key selection criteria, such as the ability of the tool to implement change, the availability and cost of developers in the market, the release management capability, and the tool’s ability to implement the selected modelling methodology.

The university assigned weights to each attribute, and Rittman Mead’s team of experts evaluated and scored each of the candidate tools based on these criteria. After the assessment, Rittman Mead proposed a new hybrid architecture and approach based on a custom version of DataVault combined with Kimball star schemas. Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) would be used to automate the loading of the data warehouse, which would run in an Oracle Database. Reporting and dashboards would continue to be produced in QlikView.

The Benefits

  • The innovative combination of data engineering, new architecture and implementation will enable St Andrews to be much more agile in ongoing developments of the data warehouse, fixing issues, adding new data, and adding new reporting or analysis.

  • Rittman Mead were able to recommend a development and delivery framework and provide accelerators to the university, which sped up the creation of the new data architecture and reduced the risk of the data transformation project. The Rittman Mead Development Framework and the accelerator have been tried and tested on multiple projects internationally.

  • Student administrators will have much better insight into the students. For the first time, they will be able to track each student’s complete journey as they study at the university. For example, they can assess the impact on resources when students change from one course to another.

When we were introduced to Rittman Mead, we realized that they understood where we were starting from and the journey we wanted to go on. So instead of proposing an off-the shelf solution, they gave us the pragmatic steps we needed to take to get there.

Rittman Mead helped us realise we could use the tools we already had, but make improvements in areas like data quality, data lineage and dev-ops. We now have a good architecture. Our data modelling is now much improved. We are working together as a team with much greater agility, getting guidance, advice, and support at the point when we need it.

Mark Hood, Head of Business Architecture and Analysis