Optimising University Intranet Services Using a Data Warehouse

Abstract

Valuable and fast intra-communication has been a problem among the University academic and non-academic staff, by not being kept updated regularly about events, inability to have standard information sharing and other related non-knowledge of students and staff activities. There are also problems emanating from lack of information integration that sometimes render intranet services ineffective. This paper discusses and recommends solutions to the aforementioned problems.

Diverse operational systems exist in the various departments of a University in different legacy formats. Utilising the Extraction, Transformation and Loading (ETL) facilities of SQL Server 2008 R2, data is extracted from the individual operational systems into a staging area, cleansed (removing errors and inconsistencies), transformed and integrated using a uniform format, and finally loading the integrated data into a data warehouse. The University intranet is optimised for efficiency by linking with the data warehouse as the user's interface for easy and speedier access and queries only by the University community. The intranet works on the existing University Local Area Network (LAN) infrastructure. <The data in the warehouse is subject oriented (stored by departments), nonvolatile (cannot be changed or modified), timevariant (stored according to the period of several years transactions) and up to date (also contains the most recent).Ensuring an optimised intranet service and having an integrated data warehouse would reduce the costs of data access, provide a uniform and timely information dissemination for collaboration and an overall effective University governance.