Session B: Information Systems and Data Warehouse |
Jean-François DESNOS: A National Data Warehouse Project for French Universities |
The French national Agence de Modernisation des Universités, (AMUE), is the Information Technology Consortium which has as members most of the French Universities, (about one hundred and ten). AMUE provides large management software applications to its members, i.e. student, financial and personnel systems; all of them designed with Oracle client/server technology. AMUE also acts as a consultant for its members in the fields of information technology, university management, and professional development. The Data Warehouse project is one aspect of the management improvement process conducted by AMUE.
Present applications are heterogeneous: the student system has been designed by AMUE and developed by a software company and the financial system has been bought on the market and adapted. The personnel system has been done entirely by AMUE.
Because of this heterogeneity, it is presently difficult, and even impossible, to present reports that cross-reference information coming from several data bases. For example, a report mixing student, staff, and financial data is not really available automatically per request.
Figure 1: Some key-numbers for a given field of studies
The production data bases are continuously developing and are organized for transactional use: register a student, print a money order, or pay a new employee, for example, and not to extract data sets for an executive information system.
A data warehouse (DWH) provides this last objective. A DWH is built by extracting data from source data bases, verifying and transforming them, and then loading a target data base which becomes the DWH. This process of extraction, transformation and loading, done periodically, provides historical layers of data, which are snapshots of the institutional information system. This DWH is designed principally to edit reports on paper, the Intranet, or by e-mail.
A data warehouse is a set of snapshots of the institution's information system. It is designed to provide on demand indicators to all the concerned individuals of the university.
For French universities, the source data bases are the student, financial, staff systems, all of them provided nationally, plus all the local applications, and also data coming from outside (for comparative reports for example). The DWH has to take into account the complexity, variety and evolutions of the sources data bases and the unsteady quality of source data.
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