DEFINING THE INFORMATION REQUIREMENTS TO BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE DASHBOARD FOR ACADEMIC PROGRAMME MANAGEMENT: A CASE STUDY FROM THE OPEN UNIVERSITY OF SRI LANKA

Abstract

Despite the growth of data, academic departments in universities are concerned about lack of insight into academic program delivery progress. Academia requires insights to execute proactive measures to ensure the successful delivery of Programme and courses. This dearth of insights is mostly due to a lack of reporting mechanisms that provide a quick glimpse of progress and real-time surveillance. In order to, address this problem, the authors drew on the sense making theory, confirming the previous theorizations by proposing the business intelligence dashboard as a tool which assist in insight extraction throughout the sense making process and in decision making about academic program delivery management. A business intelligence dashboard is one such reporting tool that provides snapshots of real time progress. Consequently, this contributes to confirm the current understanding on tools of sense making and more importantly provides academics with a prototype dashboard they can utilize to get insights for their decision on academic programme delivery management. Despite its significance for academic program delivery management, business intelligence dashboards are overlooked in Asian, primarily in Sri Lankan higher education context. Therefore, the question of what information should a business intelligence dashboard for academic program delivery management contain, to provide related insights to academia, remains unanswered. Consequently, in order to, address this question, this study was conducted focusing on the academic programme management of MBA in HRM to identify the information requirements to develop a prototype of a business intelligence dashboard to provide insights. In this endeavor, this study adopts a positivist philosophical lens and design science research approach and follows action-research project strategy. Correspondingly, an iterative research method is proposed based on the existing Cross-Industry Standard Process for Data Mining. The limited focus of this study opens for new avenue in studying the business intelligence tools’ requirements for an individual or another academic programme. Further, future study could focus on implementation of this dashboards. In addition, this case study from the open university of Sri Lanka, will provide insight into the identification of requirements and the implementation of business intelligence dashboards for institutions offering similar academic programmes