A business intelligence based solution to support academic affairs: case of Taibah University

Abstract

Business intelligence (BI) is a set of technologies and strategies allowing analyzing data and providing information to help in the decision-making process. Today, BI is used in many sectors and shows marvelous results. In this paper, we are interested in supporting decision-making in higher education. BI concepts when integrated to the process of academic affairs can make significant improvement. The present paper aims at describing a BI solution to support academic affairs at Taibah University. Using BI, we can take advantages of a set of analytical tools that support decision-making for different types of users (students, faculty members, administrators and decision makers). The proposed BI solution consists essentially of three mains tasks: (1) collecting data from different sources using the three operations (Extract, Transform and Load), (2) proposing a multidimensional solution that describes the academic processes, and (3) visualizing results through a set of dashboards and reports. Experiments are made using the SQL Server Data Tools. Three steps are detailed which are: SQL Server Integration Services, SQL Server Analysis Services and SQL Server Reporting Services. The proposed solution provides many statistical and predictive indicators needed in academic tasks.