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

PhD (Business Management) / Department of Business Management / 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.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:univen/oai:univendspace.univen.ac.za:11602/686
Date January 2016
CreatorsMutanga, Alfred
ContributorsKadyamatimba, Armstrong, Mavetera, Nehemiah, Zaaiman, Jannie J.
Source SetsSouth African National ETD Portal
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis
Format1 online resource ([12], 348 leaves : color illustrations)

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