WATER RESOURCES MANAGEMENT FRAMEWORK TO IMPROVE DECISION-MAKING BASED ON BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

Abstract

This article introduces a business intelligence framework to manage water resources, relying on a design science research methodology, data warehousing platform, and Power BI visualization. This framework consists of three phases. The data preprocessing phase comprises the core functions to validate, clean, transform, aggregate, and load data for the next phase. The processing phase includes the warehousing platform that organizes the data, builds a relationship among these data, and exports them in an appropriate format. Finally, the visualization phase generates descriptive reports for data after integrating the exported warehousing platform with the Power BI interface throughout multi-filters. For validating the performance of this framework, a heuristic evaluation was conducted, showing users' feedback regarding the framework, and a usability evaluation was conducted to determine any major issues such as visibility, flexibility, learnability, and operability. The results indicated that the tool allows for improved decision-making and transforming raw data into useful information. In addition, the dashboards provide a good way to visualize data and identify trends. These aspects align directly with the requirements for a BI tool to support strategic water resources management in Egypt. For example, agriculture consumes 46.49 billion cubic meters of water annually, accounting for nearly 60% of Egypt's total water consumption. Therefore, it is the first area of rationalization and consideration. AlShirkia governorate consumes the most water in agriculture, with an annual consumption value of approximately 4 billion 631 million cubic meters, 8 million people, 1.5 million acres, and 11.3 million tons of production.