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June 15, 2002
The Administrator's Guide to Data-Driven Decision Making (cont'd)
What's a Data Warehouse?
Once you're satisfied with the basic performance of your various student, HR, and financial information systems, you may want to consider a tool that makes it easier to analyze data from different sources.
A data warehouse is a consolidated version of data from multiple transactional databases. It contains no unique information of its own. Instead, a data warehouse pulls information from various systems, cleanses the data to eliminate incompatibilities, and then combines it in a uniform format. Because a data warehouse is the single information source for multiple databases, it's the most comprehensive, complex foundation for data analysis and reporting.
Before implementing a data warehouse, balance your investment of time and financial resources in analyzing data with the degree of potential return on the investment. To a large degree, the movement toward data-driven decision making is driven by the belief that there are relationships between variables that elude the common sense and management instincts of school leaders. Investing in data-driven decision making is placing a wager that there is something in the data that you cannot see and that hidden relationships will be uncovered that justify the expense of the implementation. If you are not certain about this bet, try hiring a short-term consultant to crunch numbers on a few questions before investing in a system that requires expensive infrastructure and ongoing maintenance.
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