April 2005 — Features
Print this article | Email this articleClick here to receive your FREE subscription to T.H.E. Journal
Data Warehousing: An Aid to Decision-Making
The concept of data-driven decision-making is as simple as it sounds. Collecting data, refining the data into a usable format, and basing decisions on the information is the essential concept. Historically, collecting data has not been hard to accomplish in schools. Interpreting and processing data so it can be considered in the decision-making process has been the difficult part. When computers first became available, individuals were needed to write custom programs to pull the data from student record systems. Unfortunately, this data extraction did not generally yield information in a useful format. Another program or set of programs was then needed to manipulate the data so that it could be useful. The steps were numerous, time-consuming, expensive, and required several people with experience in different languages or programs.
What has changed recently, and will continue to change, is the ease with which data can be extracted, processed and analyzed. The development of improved hardware and software tools to query advanced database systems has made it easier (not easy) to collect and present data in a useful format.
