TOWARDS OF AN INFORMATION SERVICE TO EDUCATIONAL LEADERSHIPS: BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE AS ANALYTICAL ENGINE OF SERVICE

Introduction:
The use of Information Technologies (IT) in educational sector is diverse. However in pedagogical area and administrative to the undergraduate education (UE) it is inadequate and cannot be used to monitoring the education and school performance. Generally these public institutions have some difficulties in performing regularly and mandatory performance evaluation, addressing three governance facets. Schools are the kernel of educational politics and to evaluate them there is a mandatory two-way process: an assessment program from school responsibility and a ministerial assessment program carry on by the inspectorate. The homemade assessment gives to the school a total independence. The Institutional and inspectorate assessment program covers three domains:
•Academic results
•Educational service provision
•Leadership and management
Each domain has several topics and indicators. The indicators are normally manually calculated using datasheets. In order to innovate and improve this process was introduced the Business Intelligence (BI) concepts as a service. In this case the BI has as main goal to help the schools to make smart decisions and obtain new indicators through data and information collected by the various information systems. This papers presents the first phase of the process, addressing the design of a pervasive BI architecture to ensure the service value and sustainability making them universal.

Objective:
The dissemination of information services, widely accessible through the World Wide Web (WWW) is bringing new challenges to organizations, addressing both the way they structure their work and the way they interact with their markets or with society. This research project aims studying a new element into the technological ecosystem present in Portuguese educational system. The essence of the IT based service explored in first phase encompasses the development of an Information system able to:
•Real-time acquisition and storage of schools information
•Online processing of information using BI technology
•Provide reports and indicators and search facilities to the stakeholders

Material & Methods:
This is a design research project. The main project includes the design of an artefact - a BI Solution. The initial tasks are concerned with the main concepts: service and architecture. To this phase it was evaluated the use of BI tools and Kimball methodology in order to have a most embracing architecture. The data acquisition subsystem uses data provided from the schools: courses, teachers, students and others. Being this a universal solution, each school has an own data warehouse and the data can be provided in diverse formats (XML, SQL).

Results:
As main result is a universal and innovative architecture able to support a pervasive real-time BI solution. This architecture is divided in 4 subsystems: Data Acquisition, Data Processing, Intelligence and Interface. The subsystem tasks are performed automatically without human intervention through the use of intelligent agents. The architecture developed presents as main features: real-time, interoperability, online-learning, intelligent agents, adaptability, optimization, universality and pervasiveness.

Conclusion:
This work proved the viability of develop a universal information service able to receive and process anytype of data sources collected from different schools in order to create analytical engine able to be accessed anywhere and anytime by the UE stakeholders.