Sixty percent of all undergraduates are living on campus. During the past few years, extensive expansions of the University's facilities were carried out. Along with facility improvements, VU made a major commitment to rebuild its IT infrastructure to position the University for the transition to a technology enabled campus. During the past four years, Villanova has implemented a comprehensive set of administrative systems, including a Student Record, Financial Aid, Alumni Development, Human Resources, Financial and Library system. All systems are based on an integrated institutional data base providing the institution with a rich operational information base with non-redundant, consistent data.
Administrative systems organize data for operational efficiency and effectiveness.
Screens are optimized for data entry and update functions rather than for information retrieval. The Data Warehouse is used extensively by a few 'super' users, however, the current data query tool does not facilitate the ease of access and navigation necessary to allow the occasional user to retrieve information without assistance. Also, the current Data Warehouse has no drill down capabilities nor does it interface readily with analysis tools. As it is widely known, data maintained by operational systems constitute only a small fraction of the entire information repository that form the basis for an institution's knowledge base. Information available on the University's WWW site, reference materials stored on electronic media, institutional documents, policies and procedures, summary statistics, spatial data, and images should to be managed and linked to operational data resulting in an integrated information environment accessible through a single environment.