Applying business intelligence in higher education sector: conceptual models and users acceptance

Abstract

Advances in emerging ICT have enabled organizations, such as universities, to generate, collect, and distribute data that may not be possible before. However, this leads to the explosion of data and unprecedented challenges in making strategic and effective use of available data. As a result, individuals who work for higher educational institutions (HEIs) are struggling to make sense of multi-dimensional and huge volume data available for them. The current student information systems in HEIs appear to mainly collect and store data in databases, thus serve as merely an information source rather than a decision support environment. Business Intelligence (BI) aims to enable interactive and easy access to diverse data, enable manipulation and transformation of these data, and users the ability to conduct appropriate analyses and perform actions (Turban et al., 2011). However, there appears very limited research on the acceptance and use of BI by individual users in universities. Therefore, this study aims to promote BI applications in HEIs by designing a demonstrational portal to introduce the concept of Educational Intelligence (EI) and its applications, and to investigate the factors affecting EI acceptance by academic individuals in a Chinese university using Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). To achieve the research aims, the study adopted two approaches: one is to design a BI portal to demonstrate BI concepts and potentials by introducing the concept and benefits of EI to the potential users. The other approach is to conduct a survey based on TAM model to understand the factors influencing user's acceptance of EI. Data of Abstract ii the questionnaire survey is gathered from the academic staff in a key Chinese university in Beijing. Based on the 85 valid responses, factor analysis is used to examine the validity of all research instruments after the test of reliability. The Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) technique is employed to verify the theoretical model and test the research hypotheses. The main finding of the SEM results indicate that the perceived usefulness of EI system strongly influence behavioral intention to use. The result suggests that user's willing to utilize EI system depends on how well the ability of EI system improves their job performance. In addition, there is no insignificant influence between perceived ease of use of EI system and attitude towards to use the EI system. It means whether users decide to adopt EI system does not depend on the ease of use of EI system. That may be because EI will be an evitable trend to the evolution of student information systems in HEIs. In summary, this study identified a gap in terms of understanding the acceptance of BI in Higher Education sector. It introduced the concept of EI based on the previous literature, and attempted to explore and demonstrate the EI concept and potentials through a demonstration portal. The study revealed the factors determining the acceptance of EI from the technology acceptance perspective. The survey findings will help practitioners to take effective measures to improve user acceptance and usage of the BI systems in HEIs. In addition, the EI demonstration portal can be further improved in the future to serve as a one stop knowledge base to help users apply EI techniques and tools for supporting their decision making and planning.