Multi-campus community college
One trusted data foundation for a multi-campus community college
Finance, HR, and student reporting ran on separate extracts and legacy reports, with conflicting numbers and a Chart of Accounts change approaching.
Outcomes
- Board-funded modernization roadmap adopted
- Finance, HR/payroll, and student data on one governed platform
- Old and new Chart of Accounts reconciled for longitudinal reporting
- Legacy report retirement plan underway
- Timeline
- Assessment, then phased build (2025–2026)
- Stack
- Banner (Oracle) · SQL Server · dbt · SSAS Tabular · Power BI · OpenMetadata
The five questions, answered
- Mission
- The college exists to transform lives through accessible, high-quality education. The IT mission had never been written down, so we derived it from the board-approved investment: secure, reliable technology that supports student success and a data-informed culture.
- Customers
- Two primary customers, institutional research and IT, with leadership, the board, faculty and staff, and ultimately students as beneficiaries.
- What they valued
- Research needed accurate, documented, reproducible data and a secure space for advanced analytics. IT needed less technical debt, less vendor lock-in, and an architecture it could maintain. A staff survey asked everyone else.
- Results
- Indicators were agreed at five levels before the build: strategic, operational, technical, governance, and cultural. Examples: fewer disputes over numbers, repeatable external reporting, and leaders asking for insights instead of extracts.
- Plan
- A curated layer, then one enterprise semantic model, with dashboards as a thin layer on top, delivered one subject area at a time and a large legacy report inventory rationalized along the way.
Challenge
The college had invested in a warehouse, but the research office still rebuilt logic analyst by analyst, and leaders saw different numbers for the same question. Finance faced a Chart of Accounts transition that would break year-over-year reporting.
Approach
We began with a current-state assessment and a modernization roadmap the board could fund. Delivery followed in phases: finance and payroll first, because period close could not wait, then the student domain.
What we built
- Cleansed and curated data layers in dbt, with tests and documentation
- A star schema and SSAS Tabular semantic models, secured by role
- Dual Chart of Accounts structures, so history stays comparable across the transition
- Payroll validation and period-close reconciliation datasets
- Catalog and lineage in OpenMetadata, with staff trained to extend the platform
Results
Finance, HR, and student reporting now draw on one governed foundation. College staff operate and extend what was built, and legacy reports are being retired on a plan.
Start with a 30-minute readiness call
Tell us what you are trying to fix or build. You will talk with the architect who does the work.
Led by Victor Manchik, founder and principal data architect