Analysis of the Role of Data Warehouse in Higher Education

Executive, tactical and strategic decisions are common in any organization. At all three levels, examples of data are found and can become useful tools to support their decision. Higher education is also one of the parts that can benefit from data warehouse. The objective of this research is to examine the use of data warehousing in higher education decision-making and to compare the types of data in data warehouse that are provided by various higher education institutes. In this paper, a description - analytic method is used. In the first part of this article, the concepts of data warehouse and its application in decision-making is expressed. Next, the data warehouse architecture which should be considered in designing a data warehouse is explained. In the next section, analytical comparison among data warehouses of different higher education institutes have been done, and finally we have recommended parts of a data warehouse that can be used and is suitable for most universities. The general findings of the study show different higher education centers use various data marts with different kinds of information because of information needs of users, but they are common in some provided data.