A context-aware business intelligence framework for South African Higher Institutions

Abstract

This thesis demonstrates the researcher’s efforts to put into practice the theoretical foundations of information systems research, in order to come up with a context-aware business intelligence framework (CABIF), for the South African higher education institutions. Using critical realism as the philosophical underpinning and mixed methods research design, a business intelligence (BI) survey was deployed within the South African public higher education institutions to measure the respondents’ satisfaction and importance of business intelligence characteristics. The 258 respondents’ satisfaction and importance of the 34 observed business intelligence variables, were subjected to principal components analysis and design science research to come up with the CABIF. The observable BI variables were drawn from four latent variables namely technology and business alignment; organizational and behavioural strategies; business intelligence domain; and technology strategies. The study yielded good values for all the observed satisfaction and importance business intelligence variables as indicated by the Kaiser- Meyer-Olkin (KMO) Measure of Sampling Adequacy and the Bartlett Test of Sphericity. The data set collected from the survey deployed at the South African public higher education institutions, was reliable and valid based on the Cronbach α values which were all above 0.9. The researcher then used the descriptive and prescriptive knowledge of design science research, and the meta-inferences of the results from the principal components analysis to produce five contexts of CABIF. The BI contexts developed were, the Basic Context; the Business Processes Context which was divided into Macro and Micro business process contexts; the Business Intelligence Context; and the Governance Context. These contexts were extrapolated within the University of Venda’s business processes and this researcher concluded that the CABIF developed, could be inferred within the South African higher education institutions. At the University of Venda, this researcher managed to draw up CABIF based business intelligence tools that spanned from leveraging the existing ICT infrastructure, student cohort analysis, viability of academic entities, strategic enrolment planning and forecasting government block grants. The correlations and regression measures of the technology acceptance variables of the business intelligence tools modelled using CABIF at University of Venda, revealed high acceptance ratio. Overall, this research provides a myriad of conceptual and practical insights into how contextualised aspects of BI directly or indirectly impact on the quality of managerial decision making within various core business contexts of South African higher education institutions.