Outline of Student Data Elements

During 11-28-18 SAH steering committee Zoom session, Sarah explained that changing field names or folder names, and moving fields from one folder to another, will break Tableau workbooks and/or Cognos reports.

My vote, FWIW, is to proceed with changes even if they do break workbooks and/or reports. With all of the data that are missing from SAH and other changes/fixes to be made, any currently existing workbooks or reports essentially are beta versions that probably will require future updating even in the absence of the above changes.

Sarah expressed concern about what happens when ISIS goes away and a new tool is adopted (it might not be amenable to ISIS' structure), and what about the people who do not work in ISIS and therefore are not familiar with the screens' names or the windows' names.

Natalie's attached pdf shows a Cognos- and Tableau-friendly counterpart to SAH (mitigating the concern about what happens when ISIS goes away and a new tool is adopted). Its structure mimics that of ISIS and Data Warehouse (BTW, ISIS displays only a single record at a time, whereas extraction tools for DW such as SQL Executer display multiple records and thus are more akin to Cognos than is ISIS). It is more elegant, (new) user friendly, and easier to learn/navigate than SAH's, consisting of six top level folders whose names are intuitively obvious—Academic History, Admissions, Contact Information, Enrollment, Grades, and Student (Demographics).

Another advantage of DW's structure and table names pertains to the distinction between Term views and Census views. DW accounts for this distinction in the tables's names rather than in the folders'; i.e., census tables have "3rd" in their name, term tables do not. Thus, the Admissions and Enrollment folders contain term and census tables which are distinguished by their names. This is much simpler and efficient to use, at least for me, than the structure and naming convention in SAH.

In response to Sarah's question what field do users have the most trouble finding, the trouble for me is with the structure, organization, and naming in SAH rather than one specific field. They are more complicated and less efficient to use or navigate than DW's counterparts, IMHO.

I would also vote to proceed with changes even if they do break workbooks and/or reports. I do not necessarily advocate mirroring ISIS (many analysts don't spend time in ISIS, and this can be a step toward embracing a post-ISIS future!), but agree that the Provost IT data package could serve as a starting point.