Question

REGARDING DATA WAREHOUSING- With a limited look at the data Harvard University has in application used by students, what might be some challenges that Harvard University might face in managing that data? How might maintaining the data warehouse affect that maintenance and development on the individual apps that feed it? How might the ability to join together data from various systems in ways not foreseen change the challenge of protecting students information?

Answer 1

Some of the issues that the university might face in managing data in student applications are:

• Maintaining data standardization and format
• Processing such large chunk of raw data into meaningful information
• Data retrieval might be difficult
• Data maintenance may become a tedious task

With the deployment of data warehouse, many of the above issues get sorted. The benefits of employing a data warehouse are:

• Facilitates processing of raw data into meaningful information
• Data processing and data retrieval becomes quite easy
• Facilitates data based decision making
• Provides competitive advantage to the organization

The ability to join together data from various systems in the university data warehouse will help in data standardization and establishing data integrity. Also this centralization will facilitate the maintenance of data homogeneity.