New data driven solution will help create greater efficiency for university awards monitoring and reporting

The University of Waterloo now has the capability to produce awards information more efficiently using a new end to end automated solution created by an in-house team of tech experts.

The new high-tech solution – combining the power of an SQL server with Microsoft Power BI – can extract information from the current awards system and deliver data-driven dashboards, according to the project lead Antonio Marques, Senior Manager, Research Data Analytics in the Office of Research.

What was formerly maintained with traditional technology that had limited capabilities and required extra time to produce information, is now using state of the art technology to look at more and different aspects of awards data without going through a deep process of analysis. The new dashboards can also be retrieved more readily using mobile devices and provides more control and better security when accessing the system.

The new tech environment, funded partially by the Government of Canada’s Research Support Fund, has been created with three objectives in mind – awards management with insights and recommendations, results transparency on awards applications and providing a more secure way to access information, resulting in an easy solution for day-to-day operations.

August 2023