Data Warehouse-based Decision Support for Higher Education Management

Presentation Summary

Ellen Hoeckmann, University of Osnabruck (Germany)
Co-Presented by:
Sonja Schulze, University of Osnabruck (Germany)

This presentation illustrates the implemented concept at the University of Osnabrueck using a flexible, analytical reporting based on a data warehouse to support users' strategical and operational decisions effectively. Increasing (inter)national competition in higher education requires efforts of all university members to improve personal and organizational performance. We will present decision support applications for all kinds of members, ranging from executives to faculty, including students as well, and even first and foremost. Originally started as a pure reporting project in 1998, R&D activities were soon redirected towards decision support for university core processes due to user requirements and acceptance issues. Functions include benchmarks for students to monitor personal performance, exams scheduling using heuristic optimization for faculty members, balanced scorecard based performance monitoring and redesign of study and research programs for campus executives. Actually, users include about 10000 students and 1200 faculty members in 175 programs of study. The overwhelming success mainly results from the bottom-up strategy concerning the supported user levels. Critical success factors are early and continuous involvement of users, supported by an interactive web-based user interface.