Higher Education Authority:
Application, Database and Business Intelligence Managed Service
Challenge
The Statistics Section of the HEA is responsible for compiling reports from data collected from Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in Ireland in order to fulfil its legislative requirements to develop and promote higher education policy in Ireland. At the core of the service offered by HEA are their business critical student records database and graduate destination report, which examines the employment, further study and training patterns of graduates each year. The availability, security and scalability of these critical systems and the need for accurate, user friendly, flexible and scalable reporting from the underlying databases drove the need for the HEA to engage with a Managed Service provider with proven application and database expertise.
Solution
Following a transition of service, Version 1 took on support for these Oracle systems from a third-party supplier. An agreed deliverable from the transition process was to identify how best to future proof the applications in terms of maintaining availability, ensuring no degradation in performance, analysing where the application would be improved through enhancements and identifying the best reporting tool for HEA.
While at the same time supporting the applications, Version 1 commenced a programme of enhancements delivering additional functionality which reduced manual operations and made critical business decisions easier.
We provide a full managed service covering both applications and databases through our Managed Service Desk. All support incidents are logged, prioritised and triaged in line with agreed service levels and our robust change management processes.
Benefits
Proactive Support
Real-time proactive monitoring and preventative maintenance serves to ensure that HEA’s core systems are highly available.
Continuous Service Improvement
Version 1 undertook a major programme of enhancement as part of the service take on which delivered huge productivity and information access gains to the HEA user community.
Training and Skills Transfer
Version 1 has upskilled HEA super users in the reporting tool, Oracle Discoverer, which has empowered users and reduced their reliance on outside support.
”We are fully satisfied with the outsourcing of our Oracle support to Version 1 - being expert in their field, we trust them to manage our key business systems, giving us peace of mind in terms of systems availability and continuous improvement. Outsourcing this function has enabled our internal IT team to focus on higher value activities within the HEA.”
John Muldoon, IT Manager, Higher Education Authority
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