Amal Alsamman, Stefanie Van Rysseghem, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium
Frequently, our office (Research Information & Data Management) receives questions from management concerning our research data. In order to formulate a reply we write a query, ask ICT to run it on the database and to send a report back to us. Then, we check the results and - if needed - perform some cleaning and re-run the query. Finally, we hand over an Excel overview containing the data needed to answer management’s original questions.
Recurring questions like “What collaborations do we have with the U.K.?” or “What about the data quality of our project” could be answered more efficiently and systematically.
In order to facilitate the growing number of business query’s regarding research data our office started to use Power BI locally to make the building of reports easier, re-usable and more visual.
Simultaneously, our institution is confronted with the same problem for other databases as well. A project to incorporate Power BI for the whole institution was launched and our office was asked to be part of the first pilot project given that we were already using our research data in a more advanced manner.
During this presentation, we will talk about a few VUB-specific data use cases and how they were visualized using Power BI. We will also explain how the implementation project for our institution will be realized over the coming months and our (data)vision for the future.