Information Systems (IS) is the use of Information Technology (IT). Business Intelligence (BI) is a specific type of IS. A BI system is an information system that uses tools to produce and deliver information. BI has become very important in the recent era as the organizational environments are getting more complex and changing faster than ever before. Research on BI uses in academia has been somewhat limited so far. Most decisions in a university are made based on large amounts of data from internal and external sources. So, a BI tool is necessary there in operational and strategic decision making, and also to compete well in the global environment which is very important for an international university like Uppsala. We made a case study on the large BI tool at Uppsala University. The tool has been used for more than ten years with around five hundred regular users currently. The system is called GLIS (in Swedish: Generellt Lednings Informations System) for Generalized Management Information System. It would be very interesting to investigate how the adoption of this BI system may influence the decision making process in Uppsala University, and thus it becomes the main purpose of this thesis. An inductive approach using a qualitative method was used in this thesis. The data collection was carried out by interviewing seven experts at Uppsala University and from some documents provided by them. Techniques from the grounded theory approach were applied for analyzing data. Our analysis shows positive effects of GLIS in Uppsala University with big improvements in decision making. The thesis draws a conclusion that the BI tool does affect the decision making process in UU as decision making activities take less time, provide better quality decisions, and are much easier using the tool. The thesis also suggests some possible improvements of GLIS for a better functionality and more user involvement. For IS practitioners, the thesis shows the power of IS tool in decision making and university management. For the IS research community, the thesis contributes with the extension of existing theory on BI uses in academia.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-208279 |
| Date | January 2013 |
| Creators | Aziz, Mustafa Nizamul, Sarsam, Ziyad |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Institutionen för informatik och media, Uppsala universitet, Institutionen för informatik och media |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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