Business intelligence usage model for higher education institutions

Abstract

Higher education plays a substantial role in the political and socio-economic development of a country. Developing countries experience several challenges when it comes to higher education programs. Therefore, Information and Communications Technology (ICT) tools can bridge the gap of poor higher education services. Business Intelligence (BI) is a system that uses analytical techniques to obtain knowledge from large amount of data. Business Intelligence can assists higher education organizations to make effective decisions, improve teaching and learning services, competitiveness, and to devise or produce new strategies and policies. However, BI implementation is often plagued with many complex processes, challenges, issues, risks, and drawbacks making it difficult to achieve BI benefits. Nevertheless, the number of successful BI implementation in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) is still inadequate. Considering the challenge and need of implementing BI system, this research aims to contribute by determining the factors that influence BI usage for Malaysian Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). The study used literature review to find the factors of BI usage. The literature revealed nine factors which promote the usage of BI system. These factors are organized into three dimensions: organizational, process and technological dimension. This study deploys a questionnaire survey method to collect data from BI users and descriptive statistics to validate the data. Based on the result obtained after the validation, it indicated that all the factors can be used by Malaysian HEIs as the factors that helps in realizing the success of BI usage. As a result, findings from this study can contribute in boosting the universities systems to obtain important patterns and predictions to formulate strategies, generate knowledge and decision-making processes that allow the achievement of institutional objectives.