A data warehouse for policy making: a case study

Traditionally, decision support systems are used to obtain information from a limited amount of data to support the decision making process. However, such decision support systems have difficulty dealing with complex, multiple data sources that are typically found in large organizations. Data warehousing is a new technology that structure data to simplify the phases of the decision support process. This paper discusses experience gained while building and implementing a data warehouse concerning an audit by a South African government institution to obtain knowledge about science and technology resources available nationally. The data warehouse was created by using the data contained in five operational relational databases. The use of the soft systems methodology during the data warehouse development life cycle ensured continued stateholder participation. The results obtained indicate that a data warehouse implementation simplifies information generation when compared to the data reporting features of an operational database system. Also, the data warehouse produced an integrated, historic source of information about the subjects included therein. In addition, the data pre-processing methods employed eliminated most data anomalies and inconsistencies.