Abstract:

Higher education institutions (HEIs) face, nowadays, enormous challenges to be competitive in a global world. The competitive environment means that HEIs, like other organizations, must be concerned with evaluating and monitoring their strategic objectives.

Business Information (BI) systems combine different sources of information, from different information systems (IS), with analytical tools to present competitive information to planners and decision makers. In this way, BI systems emerge as tools that allow institutions to create future competitive advantages.

This paper presents a case study of a Portuguese HEI, describing the implementation of a BI system to support the quality assurance system, and to improve its future strategy. This study focuses on one of the three HEI mission vectors: Teaching and Learning.
Two main points were considered in this work:
First, HEIs should use key process indicators (KPI) for different purposes:
1) to monitor their performance and strategy;
2) to assist the assessment and evaluation of their processes in a holistic way;
3) to provide information for external quality assurance audits
4) to inform all the stakeholders on the status of the institution.

Second, there are two prerequisites for developing a successful KPI system:
1) an explicit institutional quality policy and plan, and
2) the existence of IS that can provide the necessary information to feed the indicators.

To start the BI implementation different steps were followed: KPI identification, KPI validation by the process owners, identification of the IS in use in the institution, identification of the existence of the necessary information in these systems and definition of the access profiles, according to the different process users.

A set of KPI were defined through a review of the literature, the guidelines and rules from different organizations (EUA, UNESCO and the national HEI evaluation and accreditation agencies), international standards, and the institution's vision and mission, as well as the first hand knowledge and personal experience of the authors, owing to 12 years of management roles in the Teaching and Learning process.
As result of this work, it was already possible to parameterize the BI system, and to identify the digital information missing in the IS, and the necessary developments to collect it.

These initial outcomes have already contributed to identify possible improvements to the quality assurance mechanisms, which should, in turn, facilitate the institution’s continuous improvement process.

The paper is divided into six main sections. The first section presents a literature review of KPI in HEI. The second one discusses the use and advantages of BI systems. The HEI is described in the fourth section, and the case study is detailed in the fifth section. The last section presents the main conclusion and ideas for future work.

Keywords:

Business Information Systems, KPI, BI, HEI, performance management, learning and teaching process.