Organizational Readiness Toward Business Intelligence Implementation Case Study: Ministry of Education & Higher Education – Gaza

Abstract

Business Intelligence (BI) is becoming one of the fastest growing systems in the Information Management (IM) field. Due to the complexity of the implementation process of BI, Many BI investments face serious challenges leading to under expected benefit returns and most probably system failure. Thus, performing a readiness assessment toward BI becomes essential for avoiding loss and reducing implementation's risks. This study aims to develop a readiness assessment framework based on the critical success factors (CSFs) of BI in Gaza Strip environment. To achieve this objective, this study followed a three-phase exploratory mixed-methodology: Firstly, a relevant literature review was carried out to consolidate and extract the CSFs that significantly affect the BI system during the pre-implementation phase. A comprehensive list of fourteen CSFs, categorized into three domains: Organization, Process, and Technology, has been derived. In the second phase, a CSFs readiness framework has been developed by ranking and weighting the factors using AHP method and developing contextual terms for each factor. Results showed that Organization domain was the most important domain with importance weight of 62.1% followed by Process domain and Technology domain with 25.1% and 12.8% respectively. In addition, study results exposed that the top seven factors were Top Management Support, Vision & Planning, Available Data Quality, Resource Allocation, Appropriate Team Skills, IT Governance, and Continuous Improvement Culture with 20.0%, 12.7%, 9.9%, 8.1%, 7.1%, 6.3% and 6.0% respectively. Finally, the proposed framework was then applied at Ministry of Education & Higher Education (MoEHE) by conducting a quantitative survey to measure the readiness level of the top seven factors. The assessment of MoEHE illustrated that the overall readiness of the ministry was 71.4%. The study found that Appropriate Team Skills, Available Data Quality, and Top Management Support factors were adequate and suitable for BI adoption. While, Vision & Planning, Resource Allocation, Continuous Improvement Culture and IT Governance factors were insufficient and needed more attention to be improved. Organizations in Gaza are strongly recommended to use the proposed readiness framework before starting BI implementation process. Future empirical studies are recommended to validate the proposed readiness framework by checking the relationship between the proposed CSFs and BI success.