While keeping student and educator data secure
About Wichita Public Schools
Wichita Public Schools provides K-12 public education in Wichita, Kansas.
Customer Need / Business Driver
- Move analytics from Cognos to a more modern architecture
- Demonstrate that cloud-based BI could meet the district’s strict security requirements
- Connect from its current on-premise sources to Power BI on Azure
Data Sources
- PeopleSoft on Oracle DB
- IPSP, a student and grading system running on SQL Server
- Synergy running on SQL Server
- 2 CSV and 2 Excel files
Azure Synapse Analytics
What KPI and Microsoft Delivered
- This project was executed in partnership with the Microsoft team
- Using Azure Data Factory, data pulled into Parquet files on an Azure data lake
- 2 on-premise SQL Services sources, pulling 12 tables from one source and 100 from another
- 20 PeopleSoft tables
- 2 CSV files
- 2 Excel files
- Connected Azure Data Lake to serverless Synapse with ADF
- A parameterized data pipeline
- Reports in Power BI that verified data was being pulled properly
- Power BI reports mimicking Cognos paginated reports
- Security linking Wichita Public Schools’ Active Directory to Power BI users set up in Azure
- Best practices for using serverless Synapse, including partitioning, schema inference, and appropriate data types
- Knowledge transfer
Benefits to the school system
- Modelled blended HR data, IPSP data, and data from the Synergy Education Platform with Excel and CSV files to discover new insights into teacher and school performance
- Improved productivity from Power BI compared to Cognos
- Integrated automated security model
- Best practices on data engineering, Synapse architecture and security incorporated without a lot of trial and error
