ISLAMABAD
In order to highlight the significance of Business Intelligence (BI) and demonstrate its application for improving the decision making capability of senior managers of public universities, a one-day session was held for vice chancellors of public universities at Hotel Margalla, Islamabad on July 20, 2017.
The session was inaugurated by Professor Dr Arshad Ali who underlined the significance of information technology for the entire higher education sector during his opening remarks.
Specific to the application of BI, he emphasised upon increasing the utilisation of BI tool which is already available to all universities. He stressed upon utilising these tools by universities as these tools help vice chancellors and other senior managers to improve their competence and accordingly they can take timely and value-added decisions (strategic as well as tactical) pertaining to the improved governance of their respective universities.
BI is a set of methods and techniques that are used by organisations including universities for tactical and strategic decision making. It can be integrated with any type of reliable data source available in the universities that includes MS Excel, MS Access etc. Its major objective is to enable easy access to data (and models) to empower business managers with the ability to conduct the predictive analysis.
Using the BI, the managers of universities can transform data into information and knowledge so that decision making capability can be improved. In short, BI is the tool for enabling data-driven governance and for universities it is instrumental for good governance.
During the session, above-mentioned capabilities of BI were demonstrated through Oracle-based Business Intelligence tool (OBIEE) and ‘Power BI’ – a tool that has been provided by Microsoft in its MS Office 360 package.
The session was attended by 38 senior managers including 24 vice chancellors/pro-vice chancellors of 27 public universities across Pakistan.
The execution of session was facilitated by Mahesh Ahuja (HEC) with the support of IT Division of HEC.
ICT, IBA Director Imran Batada, was the resource person who provided insights about the application of BI and its usefulness for university and entire higher education sector. He also demonstrated BI’s application on existing data models (templates) with real time data. He shared best practices to be implemented in the universities and explained how to overcome challenges that universities are currently facing. The questions related to policy making and challenges for developing these data models were answered by IBA Karachi Dean Dr Farrukh Iqbal.
At the end of the session, IT division of HEC, represented by Aneela Tanveer and Muhammad Awais Javed presented the strategic roadmap of HEC.
HEC executive director also thanked Imran Batada for conducting this session without any charges.
