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Information Technology (IT) plays a key role in today’s competitive business environment. The adoption of appropriate technology can help a firm achieve greater business competency, improve business performance, and also ensure the company retains its hard-won competitive advantage (Al-Haraizah, 2011).
The relevance of IT in the scheme of university activities has been widely acknowledged in recent times. Increase in competition among Universities for student admission due to globalization coupled with the recent advancement in Information Communications Technology (ICT) have led to a very strong competition not only among companies, but also universities (Kabakchieva, 2015). High volume of student intakes, the need for efficient management of students, human resources, academics, finances, and infrastructure which leads to gathering huge volumes of data in universities, have brought enormous pressure on University administrators especially on how to increase efficiency and improve performance in their operations (Kabakchieva, 2015).
Moreover, the quest to satisfy the information needs of major stakeholders of universities have necessitated the need to adopt and implement Information Systems (IS) that will help them generate accurate and reliable reports for planning and decision making.
Consequently, many universities have adopted and implemented some form of IS with the aim of increasing efficiency and improving performance. Nonetheless, the form of IS adopted by these institutions have usually been restricted to the online transaction processing (OLTP) systems, merely used for data collection, and which has been recognized to be limited in terms of its ability to analyze massive data and adding meaningful values to them for efficient decision making (JISC, 2011).
In a bid to address these challenges, many institutions mostly in the developed world have adopted, implemented and are currently using Business Intelligence System (BIS) tools to analyze their data for decision making (Dawson & Van Belle, 2013; Olszak & Ziemba, 2012; Yeoh & Popovic, 2016). Consequently, significant amount of research attention has been devoted to the adoption, application and implementation of BIS in recent times. While a number of studies have examined the key factors that influence corporate organizations to adopt BIS in different industries, very few studies have looked at it from the academic administration perspective (Sujitparapitaya, Shirani, & Roldan, 2012).
Moreover, most of these studies have largely focused on countries from the developed world with little attention on developing countries (Durso, 2009; Head, 2010; JISC, 2011; Kelly, 2005; Kabakchieva, 2015). Impliedly, within the context of developing countries, very little research effort has been devoted to the BIS adoption especially from Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs) perspective. Given that huge differences exist in environmental (socio-economic), organizational, and technological factors between the developed and developing countries, findings in these studies cannot be generalized to the developing countries without empirical support. This study therefore contributes to the BIS literature by examining the current state of BIS adoption in Malaysian universities. In particular, the study investigates the prominent factors influencing the adoption of BIS among Malaysian universities. The analysis on Malaysian universities is relevant for a number of reasons.