Academic business intelligence system development using SAS tools

Managing an organization requires access to information in order to monitor the organization activities and assess its performance. Indeed, the increasing demand for information plus the growing data volumes and customer populations can pose problems to the organization. A way to tackle these issues can be found in Business Intelligence (BI) solutions, which provide organizations with timely and integrated information that is crucial to the understanding of the business environment and customer needs. These solutions, usually in the form of BI systems allow the organizations to gather, store, access and analyze corporate data sources for business planning and decision-making. Academic institutions, an example of these organizations, require information too for planning their academic resources and achieving academic excellence. For that reason, this article describes a study that was aimed at defining and developing data warehouse (DW) for academic domain in a public university in Malaysia. A dimensional model (DM) of the DW in Student Affairs subject area was also defined. Then, a prototype of a BI application based on the proposed DW model was developed and linked to the university’s information portal. SAS ETL and SAS Enterprise Guide were utilized successfully in developing the prototype