That wonderful panacea for consistent reporting, the master org structure has been at the front of our minds again this week. It seems so simple in principle, a single view of the organisation that ‘knows’ about all the other views that exist in Finance, HR, Student, Research and any other of the dozens of systems that exist about the place.

For those that aren’t aware, our web development team built a custom application with security and workflow which allows nominated individuals to alter the published structure (moving nodes around and adding or renaming them as required).  Each node in the structure has dynamic lookups into the various source systems to validate the foreign keys which are in turn used by our ETL when mapping source data back to the master org.  Its absolutely central to the entire warehouse and also used to manage the row-level security within the fact tables themselves.

With the recent appointment of a new DVC and CDO we have some fairly significant alterations to make and we’re giving the application a bit of a work out at present and finding that funnily enough we hadn’t quite thought of everything in the original design.

As a result we’ve altered our approach and the org structure application is now going to maintain a representation of the current structure and only the current structure - we are now relying on the conformed org dimension to retain the history and of course the association with historical fact data.  Previously we’d thought we could retain every org node whether obsolete or current in the application but it has become cluttered and confusing and I think this is a good direction to take it.  We also still have the flexibility in this application to manage informal associations such as teaching or research groups and although we haven’t any immediate need for this, still seems to still be a relevant capability.

What about you?  So how are you tackling this problem at your institution?  Do you have consistency across all your core application systems or do you just manage the spaghetti as best you can?  If you do have a master structure, who maintains it and who is responsible for ensuring the consistency and integrity is retained?