Development of Data Warehouses and Decision Support Systems for Executives of Educational Facilities in Northern Thailand to Increase Educational Facility Management Capacity

Abstract

This paper presents the development of a data warehouse and a decision support system for executives of educational facilities in northern Thailand. The aim of this research is to support executives’ decision-making, teacher's work operations, and students’ learning. The present studies of the work system development are based on the System Development Life Cycle (SDLC), the SQL Server, a web-based application using HTML5, and JavaScript. They are operated on the Windows Server providing all services on .NET technology. Both PivotTable and PivotGrid are employed to improve the business intelligence. They are also used as a tool to analyze and to create all information in terms of both tables and graphs (e.g. query, dice, slice). The sample group is chosen from twenty-six educational facilities in Northern Thailand because this area is directly involved by using the data warehouses for the educational facilities. As the results, the improvement of the data warehouses, this research provides data systems for three different groups: the work operation of the educational facility, teachers, and students. These data systems can be processed by producing the sixteen sets of desired values and data dimension. Furthermore, they also report all information in terms of tables and graphs for sixty-five different reports. System test results can be divided into two groups: the Alpha Stage and the Beta Stage 5. First, the Alpha Stage is tested by the system developers. The test results of this stage show that the system works perfectly without any faults. Second, the Beta Stage 5 is tested by the sample groups. The results of this stage can be sorted in ascending by users’ satisfaction as follows: the Functional Requirement (very good: 4.39 points), the System Design (good: 3.98 points), the Usability (good: 3.92 points), the Performance (moderate: 3.82 points), and the Reliability (satisfied: 3.70 points) respectively.