An integrated approach to teaching a Retail Dashboard development case

This teaching case reports the development of a Dashboard designed to build a comprehensive picture (view) of an organization’s customer-base. After more than 40 years of research focused on enhancing managerial support for decision-making through technology, the observation that, developing IT applications that are truly useful for top management is a highly complex and uncertain task, is still as valid as ever. The resulting Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing system supports the delegation and decentralization of decision-making and control in the organization as top managers have guarantees that their subordinates have access to reliable and timely information. This case demonstrates the utilization of IT (Data warehousing and On-Line Analysis Processing) to aid organizational decision-making through trend analysis, resulting in competitive advantage. Therefore, as a result, closer relationships with customers are developed. Additionally, this case can and is actively used to support teaching in three separate undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, covering Data Warehouse and Business Intelligence development, IT infrastructure issues and finally practical approaches to networking multiple business sites.