The use of data warehousing in strategic management at the University of the Witwatersrand

In this era of the e-economy, organizations produce vast supplies of information, and need to rapidly turn it into real knowledge for informed strategic decisions and actions to adapt to the fast changing environment. A data warehouse can be defined as "a subject oriented, integrated, non-volatile, time-variant collection of data from various databases into a single source, organized to support management needs. It is the foundation of the Executive Information Systems (EIS), a powerful user-friendly data warehouse access tool mainly used by senior management to facilitate strategic decision making. This research paper explore the use of the Executive Information System at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) to determine if it is useful as a strategic management and planning support tool for senior management. It concludes that the EIS, used for strategic planning purposes at the University of the Witwatersrand, is useful for quick trend analysis of students' pass rate and staff turnover. Critical success factors and challenges of implementing a data warehouse in a university environment are discussed.