RMIT

“By having Denodo with us, the delivery times have reduced by 70%, which translates to direct cost savings. This is not a replacement for ETL, but wherever it matters we've reduced the ETL, thereby avoiding costly replication of data across applications.”

Sirisha Mantha Data Platform Team Lead, RMIT University

Introduction

RMIT was established in 1887 as the Working Men’s College with the aim of bringing education to the working people of Melbourne.

Today, it is the #1 university in Australia for offering industry placements and it has more than 10,000 staff globally and over 90,000 students studying at campuses in Australia and internationally.

Challenge

RMIT wanted to have a 360-degree view of their students and educators so they could deliver exceptional experiences to their students with the right resources. Real-time visibility was an issue as student administration, feedback collection, learning management and data of many other systems was sitting in isolation. Marketing to prospective students was also an issue.

Before Denodo, RMIT’s 70+ data source systems were using point to point integration to run the university operations. Multiple ETL runs were required before being able to provide data to respective departments within the organization. RMIT’s data was scattered across on-premise and cloud systems, impacting:

• Speed and agility to respond to changing educational needs and student requests.
• IT operational costs and complexities as point-to-point integrations were becoming difficult to maintain.
• Delays in decision-making caused by absence of real-time data access and insights.
• University’s resource optimization in order to deliver services within the institution.

Solution

To address these challenges, RMIT leveraged the capabilities of Denodo. This solution provided a secure and real-time unified data access layer that made data discoverable and accessible for all analytics, reporting and operational purposes.

Outcomes: Transforming Challenges into Opportunities

Some of the use cases that RMIT has successfully deployed:

• Self-service Analytics: Enabling teams to discover data through Denodo’s Design Studio and Data Catalog and helping them build analytical solutions through the use of APIs created through Denodo.
• COVID-19 Tracing: RMIT was able to build real-time Covid-19 contact tracing reporting for student safety and meeting local health body requirements within 3 weeks using Denodo’s data virtualization capability, which if done using a traditional method would have taken at least 2-3 months. This task required connecting to more than 60 data sources including external data sources. Detailed story here.
• Smart Campus Monitoring: Real-time data on resource and facility usage by students and staff of the university, which helps RMIT in improving student and staff experience within the campus.
• Safer Community: Managing incidents related to students with utmost care and privacy, providing access to only authorized personnel due to highly-sensitive personal information.
• Research and Innovation: Visibility on all research projects helping RMIT to understand the project status and financial health. Being able to effectively manage grants and funding critical to maximizing the output and impact of the university's research endeavors.

Benefits

With Denodo, RMIT is now empowered to be a data-driven institution. Some of the benefits observed are:

• Applications needing to provide real-time data for reporting and analytics have increased from almost none to 60%.
• Analytical and Reporting delivery times now have reduced by 70%, which translates to direct cost savings.
• 360-degree canonical view of students and business subjects.
• Ability to minimize ETL jobs where possible. RMIT now evaluates every project whether data could be accessed without running an ETL process.