Design and development of a data warehouse for a higher education institution

During the last decades information technologies are continuously affecting approaches used in organizational management. Business Intelligence techniques and methods have been used for years to support decision making processes in business, and currently they are widely adopted by the institutional organizations as well. This thesis describes the design and development of a cloud-based data warehouse and business intelligence system for an Italian higher education institution. The objective of the implemented solution is to provide a tool to monitor the main performance indicators of a University. It should help university management to make intelligent decisions and should contribute to a general learning process enhancement. The thesis starts with an overview of the application field of business intelligence solutions in an academic environment, and proceeds with a description of a data warehousing process with the emphasis on the cloud technologies used. This document covers its all main phases: business processes exploration and requirements analysis resulted in conceptual and logical design of the data warehouse; ETL procedures, aimed to integrate various data sources, transform the data structure and make it appropriate for further analysis and finally development of reports and dashboards. Besides, for each phase, the problems and the proposed solutions are presented. In conclusion, the results obtained and possible future developments are reported as well