TECHNOLOGY has sounded the death knell for the traditional data warehouse . As a start fraXses explored and discovered the data repositories to establish what data existed , creating a single view by federating the different sources . It created what he describes as a ‘ mature view of institutional data ’, which at last brought some clarity to management , underpinning decisions realising the value of data . “ Further to this , we ’ re constructing our ‘ Intelligent Data Lake ’ to enhance big data functionality .” In adopting this targeted approach and maximising its information assets , Tully scored a first . “ FedUni was the first university to embrace Federated Data Virtualisation to get big data at our fingertips ,” he says . “ We leapfrogged over the traditional data warehouse model saving the University from significant investment . FedUni is breaking the mould ”. Also , the ability to personalise data has affected more than just the human assets of the university – it has allowed it to take a more targeted approach to upgrading its assets , saving a lot of money – another lean initiative if you like .
To describe the complex IT structure that has been built we need to go back to the cake mentioned earlier . It ’ s an ingenious and graphic way to describe to the layman what can be a perplexing series of layers , but Andrew Tully ’ s recipe is simplicity itself .
In the past he has used the relatively simple pizza as an analogy to describe the core and legacy systems : “ You have the base , which is our core technology and on that different flavours that meet the tastes of the different people who like peperoni , pineapple and so on . The cheese in the middle is the information technology that glues it all together .”
But the target for 2020 is a bit more interesting than that .
His cake has two layers . The first “ sponge ” he calls the base layer , this is the Microsoft Azure Cloud , containing elements from what they refer to as the “ Microsoft Experience ”, productivity and communication tools within Office 365 , OneDrive and Skype for Business , SharePoint and CRM offering scalability and backup . “ All of that is being provided through our Microsoft partnership ,” he explains .
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