MCG partners with UCF’s Analytics and Integrated Planning (AIP) team to transform data and AI capabilities as part of the Knight Vision program
Challenge
UCF leadership recognized the need to undertake the broad-based transformation of its technology and platforms that supports their administration, data management, analytics, and AI capabilities.
UCF President Dr. Alexander Cartwright said “Our University (UCF) has been growing at an incredible rate and the technology that once worked for us should not be expected to work for us moving forward. The Knight Vision program will allow us to modernize and simplify our technology, improve transparency across the campus community, and provide common processes for data sharing.”
Solution
MCG and UCFs’ AIP team have partnered to design and implement a data and AI platform powered by Microsoft Azure. The deployed services combine to form a unified environment for end-to-end data ingestion, data management, analytics reporting, and advanced analytics using AI. The components include:
- Azure Data Factory: Ingest, load, and transform data for usage from near-limitless situations.
- Azure Data Lake: Storage of high-volume data in all forms.
- Azure Synapse Analytics: Enterprise analytics service that accelerates time to insight across data warehouses and big data systems.
- Azure Machine Learning: Enables data scientists and developers to quickly build, deploy, and manage high-quality predictive and decision models.
- PowerBI: Enterprise reporting and visualization tool that seamlessly integrates to the DARE data assets.
MCG and UCF have used these data assets to modernize the data management, analytics, and AI capabilities. The modernizations include the development of data sourcing and data management “bots,” or virtual workers. It also includes the enablement of enterprise class machine learning services and a host of visualizations to share the insights for consumption.
Outcome
The AIP stakeholders (or DARE users) have a modern enterprise data solution for capturing, curating, analyzing, and sharing data insights. MCG and UCF have designed and launched a fully integrated planning and analytics platform using our combined understanding of both legacy on-premises data sources and modern cloud data management technologies.
We have accomplished the following:
- Migrated legacy Human Resources, Finance, and Student data using virtual workers for data ingestion and data pipeline activities.
- Enabled the Azure Machine Learning suite and integrated it into the lake and warehouse for advanced research and analytics.
- Transitioned legacy reports and visualizations to PowerBI and PowerApps for user consumption.
- On boarded stakeholders who include:
- Research and data analysts
- PowerBI or data visualization users who generate reports or insights for their areas
- Data scientists who need data or a platform to use advanced analytics
- Data engineers or those who need to Extract, Load, or Transform data for consumption
The new capabilities will improve administrative infrastructure systems that drive operational excellence, efficiency, insights (descriptive and predictive) and effectiveness for UCF’s staff and students.
