Data warehousing: a tool for facilitating assessment

To meet ABET 2000 assessment criteria, information from all university constituents needs to be collected routinely and tracked longitudinally. This can be a daunting task for any institution. Typically, one finds that even when the information exists, it is located across several decentralized databases run by different departments. Additionally, many universities are either running older mainframe legacy systems or are in the process of transitioning to newer systems like SAP or Peoplesoft. These conditions make it difficult to collect information regarding students and their performance throughout their school career and after. Data warehousing is a system of organizing institutional data that can support the assessment process.