The senior management team of a university (or college) has just completed a five-year plan to implement university-wide computing systems to support all core business processes such as a student...

The senior management team of a university (or college) has just completed a five-year plan to implement university-wide computing systems to support all core business processes such as a student management information system, payroll, and finance system, and resource management including class timetabling system. Accompanying this expansion in the use of computer systems has been a growing accumulation of transactional data about the university business processes, and senior management is aware of the potential value of the information hidden within this data. In fact, senior management of the university has a long-term goal to provide key decision-makers throughout the university with BI tools that would allow them to monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) on their desktops. However, senior management acknowledges that there are many milestones that need to be put in place to achieve this goal.

With this in mind, it is your remit to assist management in identifying the technologies and the barriers and opportunities that exist for the university to put in place the necessary infrastructure to ultimately deliver BI to key decision makers.

Investigate one (or all) of the following three tiers of the data warehouse environment namely:

• source systems and the ETL process;

• data warehouse and OLAP;

• end-user BI tools.

Compile a report for senior management that details for each tier:

• (a) The purpose and importance (including the relationship to the other tiers);

• (b) Opportunities and benefits;

• (c) Associated technologies;

• (d) Commercial products;

• (e) Problems and issues;