SMU – School of Information Systems

IS404-Enterprise Information Systems

AY 2010-11; Narayan Ramasubbu
Assignment 4
Submission Instructions:
1. Date Due: 20th September 2010, 3:30pm
2. Submit a hard-copy in class to the instructor AND upload a soft-copy to SMUVista
through the correct link.
a. Let’s save paper and ink by printing double-sided without any fancy cover pages,
etc. Just include your name, email, and any other identification information in the
header of the first page.
 
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Read the following scenario and answer the questions that follow:

As the population of Singapore is growing and getting more culturally diverse, the national
education ministry has launched an initiative called “no-child-left-behind”. The initiative is
aimed at revamping primary and secondary education in Singapore (grades 1 through 12
including JC, Poly and ITE tracks). Four strategic goals of the minister of education are listed
below:

1. Student Achievement: Improve individual student achievement by exceeding past local and
international standards (benchmarks from other Asian and G8 developed countries).
2. Community Partnership: Strengthen the partnership and support for learning among students,
staff, families, and community at large.
3. School Environment: Provide a safe, nurturing and orderly environment for teaching and
learning.
4. Staff Effectiveness: Enhance staff effectiveness by providing professional development,
recognition, and leadership opportunities.

As the first step in the educational initiative, the ministry plans to implement a three-tier data
driven approach: First, the ministry of education wants to standardize the quantitative and
qualitative data collection from all the primary and secondary institutions in Singapore. Tier-1
data reflects the information the ministry plans to collect in a standardized way: each of the
schools/Polys/ITEs report student demographics, courses details, CCA activity details, test
results, student and staff attendance, discipline rates, and graduation rates. Tier-2 data identifies
four or five most important measurable objectives each institution plans to undertake to improve
its Tier-1 data; this institution-specific data is determined by an institution-based improvement
team. Tier-3 is a narrative of factors that affected the data in Tiers-1 or 2 and other information
that explains or adds to the data reported in the first two tiers.

The ministry is also planning on a standardized procedure for better understanding how to
analyze the collected data for decision making. The ministry recognized the need to not only
collect data, but to use the collected data to monitor progress and examine trends. Individual

1
All case/business scenarios in this assignment are fictitious (though based on real life experience) and have been developed purely for academic
purposes of this course only.  

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 SMU – School of Information Systems

administrators at the institutions also need to monitor and understand their institution’s problems,
progress over the years and the necessary improvements needed for their own administrative
purposes. Parental and even public access to the appropriate portion of the data are necessary as
well.

Questions:

1. As part of building the infrastructure for the initiative detailed above, the education ministry is
planning to set up a datawarehouse, and wants to set up a data quality assurance process for
the new data warehouse.

Imagine you are pursuing an internship at the ministry. Help the ministry with the following:

a) Set up the data quality assurance process, and come up with an automated solution for
assuring data quality in their new data warehouse.

b) What do you think will be the most popular reports generated on the datawarehouse – by
students, parents, teaching staff of institutions, administration staff of institutions, and
ministerial staff? List your top 3 reports for each category of users, and give a brief
description of each (one or two sentences only – alternatively you can draw pictures if you
want).

c) Considering your list of the popular reports for each category of users, think about the
datawarehouse design. Draw a pictorial representation of the schema of your
datawarehouse design. Your picture should show all the important variables needed to
generate the reports you have identified in part b.

Write a report (not exceeding 3 pages with pleasantly readable margins and fonts) to your
internship supervisor with your answers/solutions to the above.

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